I want to challenge an implicit assumption there - that someone can control their own life to the point where it is all quiet, comfortable and easy.

That isn't in tune with reality. Maybe a lot of people are lucky enough to experience a life where nothing goes wrong - I doubt it - but there are a lot of disasters in the world where a life can just fall apart. And if you love anything, you're going to lose it and that will really hurt. The options are basically suffering or a monk-like abstinence from emotion and attachment.

Someone having a chaotic, even shambolic, life doesn't disqualify them from giving life advice. That is just normal. The best and worst of us have objectively horrible existences filled with disasters. Most people don't talk about the sheer number of things that go wrong because it makes for distressing chit-chat.

Peterson does good work in being open about some of that stuff. That is part of why he is popular.

By your own logic, advice should be disqualified if it falls into conflict with the assertion of your first sentence.

Just because it's not possible to control everything and guarantee a happy life free of pain, doesn't mean that we can't or shouldn't control some things to make life a bit better than it otherwise would be.

He's wrong about climate change but this is such a shallow piece of rhetoric. He's a "guy" who is a respected research psychologist with lots of clinical experience. Out of anyone, this makes him more likely to have interesting things to talk about when it comes to self-help. At least far more than gurus. The fact that he suffers from chronic depression, which is largely a BIO-psycho-social (emphasis on bio) problem, is irrelevant and is a total low blow.

I could counter your argument and say that him pulling himself out of his recent depression is evidence that his ideas work. If a dermatologist gets an acne breakout and then fixes it, we don't blame them for the breakout, we commend them on addressing a difficult problem. Either way, this counter-argument of mine, and your original argument, are both silly. If his depression was more biologically grounded, he deserves neither credit nor blame. If his depression was due to social situations like cheating on his wife and feeling immense guilt, then yes, we can blame him for creating a depression based on his own stupidity. But neither of us knows the situation and so it's an irrelevant thing to bring up at best.

Don't forget to mention his drug addiction with multiple relapses, which is really the only thing I was referring to.

You can't separate out that from the depression, though. He was prescribed benzos, a highly addictive drug, because of his depression, and possibly relapsed because of that depression in addition to a chemical dependency that developed over the course of treatment. If you haven't suffered, you really can't empathize with how easily that can happen.

I’m not sure Id say his life is in shambles, but I don’t think, logically, your post makes sense.

Philosophy doesn’t have to be based on individual actions and results to be helpful.

Would you say Socrates shouldn’t be listened to because his life ended in shambles? Peterson isn’t anywhere near Socrates, but I find it interesting that you would discount his information because of his personal life.

Was Socrates a drug addict trying to give people mental health advice for money?

I am put in mind of a really great passage on Wikipedia. There is no requirement that people lead a conventional life before passing out some good ideas.

> ... There he passed his philosophy of Cynicism to Crates, who taught it to Zeno of Citium, who fashioned it into the school of Stoicism, one of the most enduring schools of Greek philosophy...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes

I mean, yes he sort of was.

You know Peterson is a licensed clinical psychologist right? It’s literally his job to give mental health advice for money.

Or are you just against mental health workers getting paid?

Did you have a criticism of his ideas or just resorting to attacking his personal life?

My criticism of his ideas is that either he doesn't really believe them, or they don't really work, or both.

> he doesn't really believe them

Why do you believe that, other than calling him a "drug addict" for getting addicted to a prescribed anti-depression drug?

People that toke all the wrong turns and mistakes are often in a privileged position to have amassed some valuable advice.