See NOTICE.md for attribution and what was changed.

Questions this book tries to answer

How to read it

• You do not have to do it all: this is a menu of options, not a task list. Picking one or two items up counts, and you can leave the rest and come back to look things up when you need them. The comment "easy to say, hard to do" is right. The author has not done most of it either, and wrote it down so that it can be found when it is needed. If you want the low-effort ones, see the item "I only want to see what is most worth doing" below.
• You want AI to look things up for you: the repository contains a Chinese skill (skills/life-decision-guide), which both Claude Code and Codex can install. Once installed, ask directly, for example "should I sign as guarantor for a friend" or "is a two-hour commute every day worth it". It first looks up the related items in the text, then ranks them by the book's way of doing the sums and answers, and says which section and item the answer comes from. If it cannot find it, it says it cannot find it, and does not make up numbers. For installation, see the notes in that directory.
• You want to choose by conditions: open the online search page. You can filter by keyword, section and evidence grade, and also by the three things "does it cost money, how much time does it take, does it need willpower". Several conditions can be stacked. The content on the page is taken directly from the text in the book/ directory, and when the text changes, the page changes with it.
• Items point to each other (such as "see Section 8, item 17"): in the search page, such a pointer carries a dotted line. Click it, and the title and "in plain terms" of the item pointed to appear in place. If you really want to turn to it, press "jump there". If that item happens to be hidden by the filter conditions, the page clears the filter automatically. Reading the text directly on GitHub, the pointers cannot be clicked, but after each pointer is written what it points to ("see item 18 (write a clear IOU when you lend money)"). You know which item is meant without turning to it.
• You want to read in order: the order of items within each section does not indicate high or low value for money. Sections with many items open with a grouped guide, and you can just choose by topic.
• You want to read offline or send it to someone: download the offline single-file HTML. The whole book, with search and filters, is in this one file. Double-click to open it, with no server and no network needed, and it can be sent directly through WeChat.
• You want to print it or flip through it on a phone: download the PDF, A4 layout, over two hundred pages, with table of contents page numbers and bookmarks, and each section starting on a new page.
• You want to read it on a Kindle or another reader: download the EPUB e-book. On a Kindle, just send it over with Send to Kindle.
• You want to remember it and review it every few days: download the Anki deck and open it with Anki to import it. One card for each item, divided into sub-decks by section. The front is the recommendation, and the back is the plain-terms line, the cost and the evidence grade. You can study only some of the sections, or filter by a tag such as "very high value for money". If you download and import again later, the card contents are updated and your review records are not lost.
• All four of these are regenerated automatically after each update of the text, and the download links stay fixed. A copy you have forwarded will not update with it, so the online version prevails.
• You cannot make sense of that string of numbers: every item has a line "in plain terms". It turns the way research writes things in the "benefit" field into everyday phrasing such as "the chance of dying in the same period is about 20% lower" or "detention of a few days and a fine of so much". It uses only what the "benefit" field already says and adds no new numbers. Reading this one line is enough to decide. The "benefit" field keeps all the numbers as they are, and if you want to check them yourself, look at that field.
• You only want the most firmly based conclusions: in the search page, tick evidence grade A, and what remains are the 495 items that have specific numbers and come from meta-analyses or large trials.
• You only want what is most worth doing: tick value for money "very high", and you get 123 items that cost no money, take little time, need no willpower, and whose benefit falls in the largest tier. Add one "what you get back" on top, and that is the priority list on that basis.
• Do not be alarmed by section titles that begin with "do not": a section title states the thing that section wants to prevent (do not die early, do not waste time). It does not say that every item under it is telling you not to do something. The action to take is written in the item title, which always begins with a verb, and so makes clear by itself whether it is "do something" or "don't do something". Both kinds occur in the same section: Section 4 has both "turn 'I plan to do it' into 'at what time, where, and what to do when what happens'" and "do not watch television or scroll the news". Read by the item title, and do not apply the tone of the section title to it.

Each recommendation looks like this:

### 5. Switch the table salt at home to low-sodium salt (potassium salt)
- Cost: a bag costs a few yuan more than ordinary salt. Switch it when you buy, and it takes no extra time. The taste is almost the same.
- In plain terms: for people who have had a stroke, or are 60 or over with high blood pressure, switching the salt at home to low-sodium salt makes the chance of dying within five years about 12% lower and stroke about 14% lower.
- Benefit: a trial that randomly divided people into two groups, done in rural China, 20995 people, all people who had had a stroke or were 60 or over with high blood pressure, followed for 4.74 years. Result: the group that used low-sodium salt had a death risk about 12% lower than the group that used ordinary salt (RR 0.88). Stroke was about 14% lower (RR 0.86). Major cardiovascular events were about 13% lower (RR 0.87).
- Evidence grade: A
- Sources: Neal B 等 (2021). Effect of Salt Substitution on Cardiovascular Events and Death. NEJM. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2105675
- Notes: Disputed. The subjects of the trial were high-risk older people, and the benefit for healthy young people who switch salt is much smaller. People with impaired kidney function, or people taking potassium-sparing drugs, should ask a doctor before switching salt.

Run your own copy

Most people do not need to deploy it: the online search page is ready to use, and for offline use you download the offline single-file HTML and double-click to open it.

If you really want to run it on your own computer or server:

git clone https://github.com/eternity4719/HowToLiveBetter.git
cd HowToLiveBetter
python -m http.server 8000

Then open http://localhost:8000/ in a browser. The search page is purely static. README.md and book/ are its data, and there is no back end, no database and no dependency to install. Give the whole directory to any static server (Nginx, GitHub Pages, object storage) and the effect is the same. Note that index.html must be opened through http. Double-clicking the local file directly gives a blank page, because the browser does not let a web page read local files. In that situation use the offline single-file version above.

If you want to generate these four formats yourself (not usually needed, since the ones in the Release are generated automatically), run the commands below from the repository root (HowToLiveBetter/):

npm --prefix tools/epub ci                 # install the EPUB dependencies
npm --prefix tools/epub run build          # EPUB
node tools/offline/build.mjs               # offline single-file HTML
node tools/pdf/build.mjs                   # PDF, also needs pandoc >= 3.1 and typst >= 0.13
node tools/anki/build.mjs                  # Anki deck, needs Node >= 22.13 (uses the built-in node:sqlite)

The outputs are all in dist/.

Four resources

What this book wants to help you keep is not only lifespan. There are four things in all:

• Lifespan: live longer, and die less of things that could have been avoided
• Time and energy: the time you are alive is not spent on things with no return, and the attention and strength of each day are less wasted
• Money: waste less money, and spend it where the return is certain
• Personal freedom: do not send yourself to a detention house or a jail because you did not know of one red line

Every recommendation answers two questions: what you have to spend (money / time / energy / willpower), and what you get back (change in overall mortality / fall in a specific cause of death / time and energy saved / money saved / protection and personal freedom). The value-for-money tier of each item is worked out by the search page from the size of the benefit and the three costs, and if you want to pick the worthwhile ones, filter by it.

On whom the benefit of a recommendation falls is divided into tiers. From high to low by "how likely this benefit is to come back to you in the future": ① yourself; ② spouse and direct relatives (parents, children, grandparents on either side, grandchildren on either side); ③ friends, colleagues and other relatives: a reciprocal relationship, where what you help out may come back later; ④ strangers: the lowest tier, but not zero. The chance of a return is small, and you do not know the person's character, and there is also the side of being extorted, turned on or retaliated against. Different tiers are not combined in the calculation, and when a tier ④ case is written, the benefit and the risk are written together.

Read the first-aid section in this way: in China, of 38,227 cases of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, 79.2% happened at home, so learning chest compressions is first of all to be able to press on one's own family members. Rules such as "if you see someone drowning, do not go into the water yourself" and "if you come across a fight, do not step in to pull people apart" are themselves self-protection rules, which guard against your turning from a bystander into a second injured person. Whether to step in for a stranger is your own weighing. The items write out the exemption clauses, the self-protection actions and the risks clearly, and do not work it out for you as a reason you must do it.

The numbers for mortality, the numbers for time and energy, the numbers for money and the legal consequences are each counted on their own, and are not converted into one another. These four correspond to the four "what you get back" options in the search page, and are not ranked against one another.

Evidence grades

Every recommendation is marked with an evidence grade:

Of the 767 items in the book, 495 are grade A, 220 are grade B and 52 are grade C. In addition, 88 are marked as disputed, and 0 are marked TODO pending verification. Grade A and B items that are disputed are marked "disputed" and list the evidence on the other side. All sources cite only primary literature (journal papers with a DOI or PubMed link, or reports from official bodies such as WHO, CDC and the National Bureau of Statistics), and no second-hand retelling. For cases that officials do not publish, a few items cite original news reports with a reporter's name. These are used only to show that "this kind of thing has happened", the source field carries a web archive copy, and the notes state "media report only". Uncertain numbers are marked "pending verification".

Grade A says only that "there is a specific number and the source can be checked". It does not say that the number is necessarily causal. Grade A includes both randomized trials and studies that only follow and record without grouping, and in the latter you cannot tell whether the thing itself made the difference, or whether the people who do the thing were healthier to begin with. Which of the two applies, look at the benefit field: one that says people were randomly divided into two groups is the former, and one that says people were only recorded and not put into groups is the latter. For items on law and policy, grade A means that the original text of the statute or official document was cited.

The percentages in the benefit field and the plain-terms line are mostly a relative reduction compared with people who did not do it, not "so many fewer per hundred people". The same 12% lower means far more deaths avoided among older people whose risk was already high than among young people whose risk was already very low. So first look at which people the plain-terms line is about, and then at the percentage.

Value-for-money tier

The evidence grade answers only "can this number be trusted". It does not answer "is this worth doing". So every item is also marked with two other things: the size of the benefit (how large the good is) and the basis (what kind of thing is gained). The search page combines these two with the three costs into a value-for-money tier:

The lowest level of the three costs is "costs no money, takes little time, needs no willpower". "Takes little time" means a few minutes or less at one time, or something you can do in passing.

Of the 767 items in the book, 123 (16%) are very high value for money, 344 (45%) are high, and 300 (39%) are average. That the middle tier has many items is deliberate: the size of benefit underneath is divided into only three levels, large, medium and small, and cutting finer than that would be false precision.

This tier is the author's own judgment and not evidence. By this book's standard it counts only as grade C, and it is a separate matter from the evidence grade, with neither affecting the other. An item can have grade A evidence and only average value for money (the shingles vaccine has a phase III RCT with 97.2% efficacy, but two doses cost 3,000 to 4,000 yuan and shingles is rarely fatal), or it can have only grade C evidence and very high value for money (setting a lock-screen password on the phone and a PIN on the SIM card). "Average" does not mean you should not do it. Every item in the book is one recommended to do, and it is only that for this tier you have to weigh for yourself whether the spending is worth it.

Reading the numbers (glossary)

The text uses everyday language as far as it can, but a few statistical terms cannot be avoided when research is cited. If you cannot follow one, look it up in this table. In the online search page, hovering the mouse over a word with a dotted underline (tapping on a phone) also brings up an explanation.

Table of contents

1. Do not die early: deaths from external causes, gas and poisoning, vaccines, screening, the time scale of a psychological crisis and suicidal thoughts, what remains after being brought back, the year after a serious fall injury, the account of the remaining kidney after selling one, the home emergency kit, signs that call for a check such as visible blood in the urine, bone density tests for women 65 and over and medicine if osteoporosis is found, measuring ice thickness before going onto ice in the wild, fitting the guard and wearing goggles with an angle grinder, asking the people around you directly whether they have thought of suicide, anticoagulants if atrial fibrillation is found, one hepatitis C antibody test, ventilating before going down into a septic tank or manhole, testing and putting protection and monitoring in place, gastroscopy screening for high-risk people, and not keeping soaked wood ear fungus overnight. Basis: overall mortality or a specific cause of death.
2. Do not die slowly: tobacco and alcohol, exercise, sleep, diet (low-sodium salt, nuts, whole grains, processed meat, loose self-pressed peanut oil, vegetable oil in place of lard), prolonged sitting, and the concrete methods for quitting smoking and drinking (quit-smoking drugs, a quit day, quit-smoking clinics and hotlines, e-cigarettes, alcohol withdrawal that must not be toughed out alone), the length of a nap, how to make up for staying up late, the years account for night shift work, running the range hood when cooking, assessing hormone therapy for hot flashes around menopause, the account of keeping a dog and lifespan, regular lipid tests, if prediabetes is found, putting off diabetes by eating less and moving more, throwing away a whole pack of moldy peanuts, corn and nuts, and not eating raw fish slices made from freshwater fish. Basis: overall mortality or a specific cause of death. For the long essay see Body clock and night shifts.
3. Do not waste energy: sleep, interruptions, multitasking, social debt, what to expect when dealing with institutions, not toughing out period pain, cognitive behavioral therapy first for long-term insomnia, getting checked for sleep apnea if you snore and stop breathing in your sleep. Basis: energy / time.
4. Do not waste time: projects with no return, sunk costs, procrastination (the emotional explanation, changing the environment, commitment devices, how long a habit takes, self-help materials), meetings, commuting. Basis: time.
5. Do not waste money: subscriptions, lotteries, converting interest and borrowing to an annualized rate first, insurance, fund fees, personal pensions, car insurance, prepayments, livestream selling, the medical insurance personal account, children being cheated and top-up refunds, beaded bracelets, luxury watches and designer toys not to be counted as investments, how to check the test report on jewelry and jade, blind boxes and gacha, which lawful channel to take if you want to buy overseas assets; at the end of the section six items on insurance: buy only for losses you cannot bear, earners buy term life insurance first, surrender during the cooling-off period, do not treat insurance as a deposit at a bank counter, do not use an agent to surrender, beneficiaries and the time limit for claims; then do not buy virtual currency (trades in coins are not protected by law, and losses cannot be recovered); then how to do the sums for a person with no employer who pays employee pension insurance themselves: pay at the lowest tier, and paying up the years first is the best value, and even at the lowest tier you must draw the pension for about 10 years to break even; the last three items on buying a car: when the new-car "three guarantees" allow a car exchange or refund, how to ask for a refund and triple compensation when a second-hand car bought from a dealer had an accident or flood damage concealed, 4S-shop finance service fees, bundled insurance and registration needing no payment, and when a tour group takes you into a shopping shop, asking the travel agency to take the goods back within 30 days. Basis: money.
6. The anti-list: things that look high in value for money but are not, including the claim that "willpower gets used up", learning lifting postures to prevent back pain, taking a lot of calcium and drinking bone broth after a fracture, using an AI chatbot to judge your own illness and legal problems, and the claim that "people can die at any time, so spend all the money early", not having an arthroscopic cleanout for middle-aged and older knee degeneration pain, not treating long-term insomnia with melatonin, and not asking for an intravenous drip for a cold.
7. How to get by when you have no money: relief, subsidies, finding work, lodging and food, medical care, claiming unpaid wages, avoiding traps, negotiating installments with the bank when you cannot repay credit cards and online loans, and not using the middlemen who promise to "stop interest and defer repayment". Basis: money / protection.
8. Do not get yourself caught up: law and property safety: traffic accidents, stopping payment after being cheated, AI face swapping and voice cloning, how much a sentence is reduced by surrender and truthful confession and why the route of "outlasting the limitation period" does not work, the routes open after being accused and after a false report is made against you, the dividing line between using a report to extort money from someone and making a normal claim yourself, conflict and venting-style extreme violence, the impulse to hurt others and the right of people around you to send you for treatment, the four legal gates for attacking a family member after insuring them, going through the platform and an injunction after online abuse, betrothal gifts, property owned before marriage, guaranties, anti-fraud, acquaintances asking you to show your face on camera, AB loans where you read out a verification code to take a loan, the limitation period for lawsuits, enforcement and the dishonest debtor list, a dog owner's responsibility and rabies vaccine registration, the acceptance receipt after calling the police and remedies for a refusal to open a case, paying money to smooth things over being the crime of bribery, and door and window locks and sensor lights to prevent burglary. Basis: money / personal freedom.
9. Legal red lines ordinary people often cross: rumors, insulting heroes and martyrs, viewing overseas content without reposting it, spreading pornography, money laundering as a side job, forging materials to cheat a loan, staging accidents to cheat insurance, throwing things from a height, imitation guns, drones, secret filming, the lawful route of adoption and the line from trafficking and abandonment when you cannot raise a child, gambling, wild game, selling organs and helping someone find a donor; items 24 and 25 are on copyright: fan translation, reposting and sharing cloud-drive resources infringe even if you charge nothing, and running ads and charging membership fees can lead to a sentence, and if you write fan fiction and take it to publication for sale, get a license first; the end of the section covers being punished for carrying a baton, stun device or dagger for self-defense, electrofishing and fishing in the closed season, lighting fires in forest or grassland areas when visiting graves or picnicking, and not getting someone to take an exam for you or buying and selling answers. Basis: personal freedom / money.
10. Is dating and marriage worth it: partner-choice strategy, the red line of pestering, signals of interest, relationship quality, long-distance relationships, the registration procedure, premarital checkups, the health account, the time account, the money account, parents paying for a home and the couple's joint debts, the cost of exit, going together to couples therapy when the relationship is stuck, holding a banquet without registering not making you a married couple, what to do when a spouse spends joint money on tipping livestream hosts or transfers it to someone outside the marriage, and writing down child support and visitation clearly at divorce. For the long essay see Is marriage worth it.
11. Red lines for programmers and technical people: game cheats, crawlers, ticket-grabbing scripts, deleting a database, taking source code, taking on development jobs, non-competes, open-source licenses, filing, tools that skip or block other people's ads, AI relay stations, cracking patches and key generators, DDoS traffic attacks. Basis: personal freedom / money.
12. Starting a business and doing trade: do not lose the family savings: capital, guaranties, choosing the legal form, registration, licenses, tax filing, invoices, tax-related fraud, contracts, hiring, mass production, intellectual property red lines in sourcing goods and using images, and exit; at the end of the section, two items on start-up scams such as outsourced operation, shop-opening training and "no-inventory" selling, which first take small sums and then pile on more layer by layer, plus the annual report to file in the first half of each year, not openly recruiting people to put in money when you pool funds for a business, checking whether a unit can be used for a shop before renting it, and writing a written agreement first with partners. Basis: money / legal liability.
13. Emergencies: what to do first: cardiac arrest, stroke and posterior circulation stroke, eye stroke, heart attack, aortic dissection, thunderclap headache, chronic subdural hematoma, pulmonary embolism, severe bleeding, bites, burns and scalds, anaphylaxis, epilepsy, low blood sugar, electric shock, carbon monoxide, accidental ingestion and chemical burns, objects stuck in the body, splinting a fracture, scams, privacy threats, heatstroke, fire, drowning, being lost, hypothermia, snake bite, earthquake, wild animals, lightning, altitude sickness, ticks, drinking water in the wild; also whether you can afford to rescue: how to help up an older person who has fallen, what to do when you come across a fight, whom to ask for money after being hurt while saving someone; the end of the section covers a baby under 1 year choking, infant CPR, a child swallowing a button battery or magnetic beads, looking after a drunk person, how to preserve a severed finger, and how to put back a permanent tooth knocked out. Basis: survival rate and money, and the last few items also personal freedom.
14. Accounts and information security: two-factor verification, passwords, SIM cards, a lost phone, fraudulent charges on a bank card, login devices, app permissions, face recognition, rights of access and deletion, AI relay stations of unknown origin, checking the phone cards and bank cards under your name every year, and changing the linked accounts before changing your number. Basis: money / personal information.
15. Renting and buying a home: security deposits, forced eviction, agents collecting money, fund supervision, "sale does not break the lease", checking title, the special transaction fund account, partitioned rooms, an urban hukou (户口, household registration) holder not buying homestead land and only renting a farmhouse; buying a home: the off-plan fund supervision account, subscription earnest money and refund when the loan is not approved, area errors and advertising promises, late delivery and title registration, advance notice registration, negotiating a lower rate on an existing mortgage, using a provident fund loan first, property management not being allowed to cut water and power to press for fees, inspecting a new home at handover and the warranty period. Basis: money.
16. How to live with a chronic disease: taking medicine as prescribed, cross-province settlement for outpatient chronic and special diseases, follow-up records, not stopping medicine to try folk remedies, long-term prescriptions, family doctor contracts, screening for complications, preventing kidney stone recurrence, treat-to-target and attack prevention in gout, hepatitis B carriers having an ultrasound and an alpha-fetoprotein test every six months, inhalers and pulmonary rehabilitation in COPD, an annual kidney check for people with high blood pressure or diabetes, guided exercise after colon cancer surgery. Basis: overall mortality / money. For the long essay see Right after a chronic disease diagnosis.
17. Older people at home: consensual guardianship, the form of a will, accounts and scam scripts, investment-for-retirement and reverse-mortgage scams, long-term care insurance, pressure sore prevention for the long-term bedridden, having cataract surgery assessed when it affects seeing the road, older people walking dogs without being pulled over, checking the filing and the security deposit ceiling before sending someone to a care home, children's nursing leave, going to a memory clinic when memory gets worse. Basis: money / personal freedom, and mortality for the three items on pressure sores, cataract and dog walking.
18. Is raising a child worth it: childcare subsidy, maternity leave and maternity allowance, protection in the "three periods" (pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding), the time account, the money account, the age account of having a child a few years later, paternity leave and parenting leave. Basis: money / time.
19. Employment, leaving a job and work injury: overtime pay, annual leave, probation; occupational disease hazard notification and the three examinations, protection against dust and noise; N, pay in lieu of notice, 2N, not signing a voluntary resignation, keeping evidence; the time limit for recognizing a work injury, an employer that has not enrolled you in insurance, assessment of work capacity, benefits for death from work; certificate of leaving, personal income tax on severance; transferring pension and medical insurance relationships when you change city for work, double wages when no contract was signed, how to make the employer pay social insurance and how to resign and get severance, only two kinds of liquidated damages for leaving that can be agreed, putting an objection in writing if you do not agree to a transfer or pay cut, equal pay for equal work and joint liability for labor dispatch. Basis: money. For the long essays see What to do first after a layoff and Before changing jobs or cities.
20. How to care for a newborn: safe sleep, the first hepatitis B dose, national immunization program vaccines, breast milk and complementary food, formula water temperature, honey, vitamin K, the red line for seeking care with a fever, never shaking, diapers and big purchases, introducing peanut early to high-risk children to prevent allergy, signs for seeking care in newborn jaundice, vitamin B12 when the mother is vegetarian, not buying a walker with wheels, vitamin D for babies every day, running cold water first at bath time to prevent scalds. Basis: infant mortality / money.
21. Going abroad, travel and safety overseas: travel advisory levels, 12308, the limits of consular protection, overseas medical insurance, overseas high-pay recruitment scams, the annual quota for cash withdrawal abroad, lost documents, overseas driving licenses, agency filing, checking the rules of the destination before taking medicine abroad, and not bringing meat products and fruit back into the country. Basis: money / personal freedom.
22. How to relax: entertainment venues and stress relief: safety exits, clearly marked prices, red lines on drugs, things handed to you by others, where to hold a murder-mystery game; exercise, mindfulness, breathing, social contact, green space, not soaking in a hot spring or sauna after drinking, wearing a helmet for skiing and cycling. Basis: money / personal freedom, and also energy / overall mortality.
23. Which skills are worth learning: study or work (the child labor age line, education and mortality, the national education structure, tuition waivers, grants and student loans, the route up from secondary vocational school, how to do this sum yourself), the return on education, knock-off certificates, training subsidies, which skills are hard for machines to replace, skill grades, how to check shortage occupations, and after you decide what to learn, how to learn it (self-testing, spaced practice, not relying on highlighting, interleaved practice, no evidence for learning styles), and finally professional titles (application channels, taking an exam in place of review, the consequences of faked substitute review, being awarded does not mean being hired), and whether to go on to a master's or a doctorate (tuition and grant levels, the income return after removing individual differences, the share of doctoral students with depression and anxiety). Basis: money / time, with one item on mortality.
24. Seeing a doctor: how to spend less and avoid detours: graded care and referral, the deductible counted continuously, the difference in reimbursement rates, reserved appointment slots, assessing the need for care in another place, keeping and sealing medical records, the four-level order of emergency pre-triage, emergency disease relief when you cannot pay, the timing of a disability assessment, how to get a disability certificate, no need to give doctors red envelopes, the lump-sum price of dental implants and the scope of medical insurance, buying negotiated drugs at "dual channel" pharmacies, online follow-up at internet hospitals, checking the inpatient fee list item by item. Basis: money / time.
25. What to do after someone dies: calling the police and the death certificate, transporting the body and cremation, objecting to the cause of death and autopsy, canceling the hukou, the list of basic funeral items, price violations, agency filing, the balance of the provident fund and social insurance benefits, the deceased's personal information rights, debts being paid only within the inherited estate and giving up the inheritance in writing, and not defaulting to a notary first when handling an inheritance. Basis: money.
26. Building a website or platform: licenses, filing and servers: red lines on payment and settlement, ICP license and filing, livestreaming and audio-visual qualifications, platform verification and tax-related reporting, content governance, real-name registration, minors, notice and takedown, data leaving the country, choosing a server, apps and mini programs also needing filing, notifying users after a leak of their information, the duty to remind about automatic renewal. Basis: personal freedom / money. For the long essay see What licenses a platform needs.
27. Pregnancy and childbirth: from confirming pregnancy to the paperwork on leaving hospital: folic acid, opening the handbook and free prenatal checkups, screening for the three infections and blocking mother-to-child transmission, tobacco and alcohol in pregnancy, aspirin and gestational diabetes, signs for going to hospital at once, handling a water break, painless labor, indications for cesarean section, maternity insurance, the birth medical certificate, newborn screening, insurance enrollment and hukou registration, the 42-day postpartum checkup, a cat needing no rehoming when you are pregnant, the inactivated flu vaccine in pregnancy, sleeping on your side in late pregnancy (disputed), postpartum contraception and birth spacing (disputed). Basis: mortality and money. For the long essay see Things to handle around childbirth.
28. Do not ruin your body for your looks: extreme dieting and eating disorders, the two certificates for medical beauty clinics and attending doctors, the blindness-risk sites for facial fillers, weight-loss products illegally containing sibutramine, anabolic steroids, prescriptions and follow-up for weight-loss drugs and sex hormones, body image assessment, orthodontic braces needing a doctor's in-person check and follow-up, checking the 国妆特字 number on freckle-removing and whitening creams. Basis: mortality (health endpoint), and the two medical beauty items also personal freedom.
29. After a major blow: the cardiovascular window in the first month of bereavement, the first week after a serious diagnosis, losing a job, the half year after losing a spouse, bereavement by suicide, how to find a substitute for a person when you have neither family nor friends, a child whose parent has died, where to register when grief is stuck, divorce, 12356 and 12355, not making irreversible decisions in a period of stress, why dying to pay off debts is no way out, psychological treatment after trauma and not doing a single debriefing session. Basis: overall mortality, and money for the four items on spending and entitlements.
30. Children after starting school: acute conditions counted in hours, not delaying treatment for an exam, what to do when bullied, 2 hours outdoors every day, the student checkup report, screening for adolescent depression, products that claim to cure myopia, hard rules on sleep and homework, suspending studies while keeping the student status, cycloplegic refraction and follow-up, pit and fissure sealing, disciplining a child without hitting, shouting or scolding, classes for parents, not sending a child to an internet-addiction school, teaching a child to know the private parts to prevent sexual abuse, the age threshold for riding on the road, not returning to play on the day of a head knock in sport. Basis: mortality and health endpoints, plus one or two items each on money and time.
31. Paths after eighteen: the legal thresholds of twelve paths; joining the army (military service registration, two years for conscripts, joint punishment for refusing service, tuition compensation and further study, resettlement and reporting within 30 days, retirement pay and years of service and tax); targeted recruitment exams for grassroots service projects; special-post teachers being given a permanent post at the end of the term; firefighters and military civilian staff; self-study exams, adult college entrance exams and the open university; the 6-year performance obligation of publicly funded normal-school students and targeted medical students; what kind of company to look for when working abroad; personal income tax and receiving foreign exchange when working remotely from home for an overseas company; start-up guaranteed loans; social insurance for flexible employment; occupational injury protection for delivery riders; checking fresh-graduate status before taking the civil service exam within two years of graduating. Basis: money / time, and the refusal-of-service item also personal freedom.
32. Studying abroad: status, work, insurance and recognition back home: checking the list of accredited institutions before paying tuition; the new US F-1 rule of "four years at most, leave within 30 days of finishing" was suspended by a court, and for now it is still until the program ends with a 60-day grace period; the working-hour limits in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia; checking eligibility to work by country, type of work and enrollment status; reporting within 10 days of moving; the Ministry of Education's study abroad warnings; Australia's OSHC must not lapse; the UK health surcharge; 10 to 20 working days for CSCSE recognition; lists of institutions under enhanced scrutiny, the cap on days of unemployment on US OPT, Canadian provincial attestation letters. Basis: money / personal freedom.
33. Living after disability: the three on-the-spot steps for autonomic dysreflexia, the suicide window in the ten years after becoming disabled, the voluntary principle and the two exceptions for psychiatric admission, the caregiver's own risk of death, wheelchair pressure-relief cushions, scams claiming a cure, the six benefits to ask about in full after getting the certificate, long-term care insurance not only for older people, rehabilitation relief for ages 0 to 6, the subsidy for barrier-free home modification, employment by quota and the disability employment security fund, personal income tax reduction, guide dogs and free travel, reasonable accommodations in the college entrance exam, schools not allowed to refuse and home teaching, the C5 driving license, how to choose a rehabilitation institution, hearing aids, assessment of capacity for conduct and guardianship, and not leaving a catheter in long term after spinal cord injury. Basis: mortality / money / time / personal freedom.
34. Do not let medicines kept at home cause harm: not doubling up on paracetamol (acetaminophen), no aspirin, nimesulide or metamizole for a child's fever, high-risk people for stomach injury from ibuprofen, not giving compound cold medicine yourself to under-2s, not taking ibuprofen yourself after 20 weeks of pregnancy, omeprazole taken on your own for 7 days at most, no antibiotics for a cold, rehydrating first for diarrhea and no antidiarrheal for children, headaches from taking too many painkillers, putting expired and leftover medicine in harmful waste, no alcohol while taking a cephalosporin or metronidazole and for 7 days after stopping, not driving after cold medicine and antiallergy medicine that cause drowsiness, and reading the package leaflet and avoiding grapefruit and pomelo if you take lipid-lowering or blood pressure drugs. Basis: mortality.

Section titles such as "Do not die early" and "Do not waste time" state the result the section wants to prevent. Whether an item itself says to do or not to do something is governed by the item title. For long essays see also Home emergency kit, What licenses a platform needs, Is marriage worth it, Should you stop to help a stranger, Body clock and night shifts, and the four lists of scenarios in time order: What to do first after a layoff, Things to handle around childbirth, Right after a chronic disease diagnosis and Before changing jobs or cities. The record of how each source was verified is in verification records.

This book was written with the help of Claude Code: finding the primary literature, checking item by item that the numbers agree with the original text, and maintaining cross-references and build scripts. The choice of topics, the trade-offs and the final approval are the author's responsibility, and every number can be found in the original text in the source field.

index.html in the repository root is the online search page: it filters items by keyword, section, evidence grade and cost dimension (money, time, willpower), and reads the data directly from this file. After you turn on GitHub Pages in the repository settings (Deploy from a branch, branch main, directory /), it can be visited. tools/epub/ is the e-book build script. Run npm --prefix tools/epub ci && npm --prefix tools/epub run build in the repository root to produce an EPUB locally in dist/. GitHub Actions runs the same script automatically after the text changes and updates the Release.

Main text

The main text is split by section into 34 files in book/, and you enter by clicking the section name in the table of contents above. It was split because the single file already exceeded the 512 KB limit on GitHub's rendering of Markdown, and the later sections could not be displayed. The online search page reads these files together, and its usage is unchanged.

License

The text is released under CC BY 4.0, covering the writing in book/, docs/ and this README. You may reprint, adapt and use it commercially without asking the author, but you must do three things:

• State the source: "高性价比人生指南", with the repository link https://github.com/eternity4719/HowToLiveBetter .
• Attach the license link https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .
• If you have changed the content, say so. The statutes, subsidy standards and deadlines in the book are often updated, so it is advisable also to write which day's version you have synchronized with.

The code is under MIT, covering tools/, skills/, index.html and .github/.

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