Vonnegut Told the Babies the Only Rule That Mattered

In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, a character delivers a speech at the christening of a pair of newborn twins. It’s one of the strangest, funniest, most quoted passages he ever wrote: “Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

That’s it. That’s the whole moral system, delivered to an infant who can’t yet hold its own head up, by a man too sincere to say it without a joke wrapped around it first. Vonnegut did this constantly — smuggled the most tender thing he believed inside something absurd enough that you’d let your guard down before it landed.

The advice that actually changes how you live rarely arrives dressed as advice. It usually shows up disguised as a joke you can’t stop thinking about.

Most people, asked to summarize the entire purpose of being alive in one rule, would say something about purpose, legacy, achievement — something that sounds impressive on a graduation card. Vonnegut, a man who survived a firebombing as a POW and spent decades writing about how absurd and brief everything is, landed on “you’ve got to be kind” and didn’t feel the need to add anything to it. He wasn’t being modest. He’d done the math and that’s what was left over.

You don’t need the hundred years to add up to anything more complicated than that. Most days, that one rule is plenty to be getting on with.