Recently, while engaged in a deep philosophical discussion in the coffee shop, a friend asked what I suppose he assumed to be an equally deep question: what do you want at this stage of your life? (This stage being deep into my dotage.)

However, I didn’t hesitate, not a nanosecond. “Peace.” I’m not sure he believed me, and we went on to talk of other things. But I was certain of my answer. I had, I thought, had sufficient frustrations in my life to qualify for a lifetime supply. Having been mostly self-employed since I was thirty, I had dealt with frustrations caused by employees and by clients.

Once I stood in the hall outside my office and yelled, “Bring me answers, not questions.” That didn’t work either.

I had been in advertising, where you’re judged multiple times a month as your work goes in front of the public. I had produced corporate shows where I had to take responsibility for dozens of people, and no error was tolerated. And I had written scripts for people who thought that they could write better scripts for themselves if they only had the time.

Then, on the other side were employees who, in my judgment, were supposed to make life easier for me, but didn’t.

Now, all of that has changed. I no longer have clients or employees. What I write is largely because I’m a writer and that’s what I do. If nobody reads it, it doesn’t change my life. Life should be much simpler. Then I recognized that a lot of it wasn’t, and that was my fault.

I enlisted in armies fighting wars that didn’t affect me, expended time, emotion, and energy tilting with people who, like me, were expressing their opinions. And generally staying stirred up.

To fix that, I gave up on Quora, where I thought I was spending too much time arguing instead of enlightening or being enlightened, and I restricted my participation in other so-called social media. Then I came up with five simple rules, which I will pass along in case someone else can use them. These are my rules for living the simple life:

If it’s not a problem, don’t treat it like one.

The world has always had troublemakers, but it hasn’t always had the internet, which provides troublemakers with a huge megaphone. A year or so ago, someone posted a meme saying that we should advocate for school children saying the Pledge of Allegiance. That, of course, ignores the fact that they already do. (It also ignores the interesting fact that the Pledge was written by a Socialist minister and did not contain the words “under God.”)

A bunch of people took up their cudgels and pitchforks and attacked the mythical problem. They do the same thing with Starbucks cups and Christmas greetings.

I’ve decided to do none of that.

Make sure it affects me.

When I was a child, this was called “minding your own business.” My mother was very big on this, respecting other’s boundaries and protecting her own (which worked with everyone except my grandmother, who felt it was her constitutional duty to be up in everybody’s business.)

This means that if young people want to wear clothes I consider outlandish, that’s not my concern. If two men or two women decide to get married, that’s also not my concern (although I find it strange that a large number of people are scandalized at the thought while praising someone who cheated on all three of his wives.)

As I assess the problems in front of me, I can see that most of them don’t change either my life or the lives of those I love. I can safely ignore those problems.

It isn’t, however, as narrow as it sounds. The recent SNAP snafu didn’t affect me or my family directly. We’ve been generously blessed. However, my faith says that if anyone goes hungry or lacking, it is my problem, and I should try to do something about it. Or if someone attacks the powerless, I have a duty to stand between them and the people exerting the power.

Use Occam’s Razor.

I have been given to overthinking things, not to the point that when someone said, “Good morning,” I wondered why he said that, but too much, anyway. I’ve decided to accept everything at face value unless I have a definite reason not to. I’ll be wrong sometimes, but I’m wrong sometimes now, and I’ve wasted a lot of mental energy.

Make a Decision.

Similarly, I’ll make a decision and stick to it. I’ll make a real effort to do my “what ifs” before the decision and not after it. It may be the wrong decision, but if I’ve given it sufficient thought before making it, it has a better chance of being right than whatever I change my mind to. If I find that I’ve made a bad decision, I’ll try to learn from it, fix it, and move on.

Be grateful.

I think we’re trained from an early age to worry about what we don’t have. Not intentionally, of course, but from observing those who have something we don’t have, not realizing that they’re observing us back. Fortunately, for all of my adult life I’ve had Linda to remind me that we had everything we needed to live, and often to live well. (It’s good to have one grounded one in the family.)

The Buddha got it right 2500 years ago: contentment is the absence of stress and desire. We should breathe deeply and be grateful for what we have.

And may peace be unto you.