HowToLiveBetter prices 767 life decisions by cost and evidence, but its rules are written for mainland China

Every one of the 767 entries carries a price, a payoff and an evidence grade

HowToLiveBetter is a Chinese-language guide of 767 recommendations spread across 34 sections, from not dying early and avoiding slow decline through money, legal red lines, unemployment and workplace injury, dating and marriage, pregnancy, first aid, account security, renting and buying a home, chronic illness, disability and household medicines. Each entry states what it costs you, what it returns, and how strong the evidence is. Sources are limited to journal papers and official documents. The one exception is cases where the official record is not public; there the book cites bylined original news reporting and attaches a web archive. Verification notes live in docs/核实记录/, so a reader can see how claims were checked. The order of entries within a section does not signal which is more cost-effective, so do not read the first entry as the best one.

Law, medical insurance and social insurance follow mainland China rules

The institutional chapters are written against current mainland China regulations. That covers section 7 on what you can claim when out of work or unpaid, section 8 on bride price, premarital property and large transfers during a relationship, section 9 on side jobs that turn ordinary people into criminal defendants, section 11 on code and contract work that leads to convictions, section 19 on overtime pay, annual leave, severance and workplace injury, and section 26 on which licences a paying website or platform needs. For a reader in another country these entries do not transfer. A severance formula, an insurance reimbursement rule or a licence requirement from section 26 says nothing about your own jurisdiction. Even inside China the book warns that many policies are carried out differently from place to place, and that when you actually deal with an office, a hospital or a court, the local department, doctor or lawyer has the final word.

The author calls it an option list and admits to skipping most of it

The guide is explicit that it is a menu, not a checklist. Picking up one or two entries counts as success, and the author says they have not done most of the entries themselves; the point of writing them down is to find them when needed. That framing matters for how you use it. Reading all 34 sections in order will not tell you where to start, so the project offers a self-check page, selfcheck.html, which asks a few dozen yes or no questions and shows which entries you have not done yet and which to do first. The README also warns that the content may be outdated or wrong. Errors go to the GitHub issue tracker, and the author asks readers to file them, so a reader who spots a stale figure has a direct route to report it.

The search page filters by money, time and willpower, and stacks the filters

The online search page at eternity4719.github.io/HowToLiveBetter/ is generated from the book/ directory, so when the text changes the page follows. You can filter by keyword, section and evidence grade, and also by three practical axes: whether an entry costs money, how much time it takes, and whether it needs willpower. Filters combine. Entries point to each other with references such as see section 8, entry 17. On the search page those references carry a dashed underline; clicking one shows the target entry's title and its plain-language summary in place, and a jump button takes you there, clearing any filter that was hiding it. On GitHub the same references cannot be clicked, but each one spells out its target, so reading book/ directly in the repository still works, just with more scrolling.

One epub-latest release carries the PDF, EPUB, offline HTML and Anki deck

Downloads come from a single release tag, epub-latest, labelled as automatically updated, rather than from numbered versions. It holds four files. HowToLiveBetter.html is a single offline file containing the whole book plus search and filtering; it opens with a double click, needs no server or network, and can be passed around in WeChat. HowToLiveBetter.pdf is laid out for A4, runs over two hundred pages, and has a table of contents with page numbers, bookmarks and a new page per section. HowToLiveBetter.epub is for e-readers, and Kindle users can send it with Send to Kindle. HowToLiveBetter.apkg is an Anki deck with one card per entry, sub-decks by section, the advice on the front and the plain summary, cost and evidence grade on the back. Because the tag is overwritten, a file you downloaded months ago does not say which revision it is, so download again before relying on a figure.

The life-decision-guide skill answers from the book and says when it cannot

The repository ships an AI assistant skill in skills/life-decision-guide that installs into Claude Code or Codex. You ask it a decision question, such as whether to co-sign a loan for a friend or whether a two-hour daily commute is worth it. It first retrieves the relevant entries from the book text, ranks them using the book's own cost and benefit accounting, and cites the section and entry number for each point. When it finds nothing, it says so instead of making up numbers. The limits follow from that design. The skill is written in Chinese, so English prompts get no guarantee of the same behaviour, and it inherits the mainland China scope of the institutional chapters. It is a lookup tool over this book, not a general advisor, and installation steps are in the README inside that skill directory.

Translations and derivative apps are maintained by other people and can lag

Several translations exist, none of them in this repository. dlgrv maintains English, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic and Indonesian versions at book.dlgrv.com. parveen0029 maintains a separate English translation titled The Evidence-Based Life, and chuanman2707 maintains a Vietnamese one. Reader-built websites, apps, mini programs, browser extensions and datasets are collected in 衍生项目.md. The README states that these are maintained by others, may fall behind, and that the Chinese original in this repository is authoritative. An English reader therefore faces two gaps at once: the translation may not reflect recent corrections, and the institutional advice still targets mainland China. When a translated entry matters, find the matching section and entry number in the Chinese book/ text and compare.

Only the Guomai Culture edition is official on ebook platforms

The official version sold on ebook platforms is published exclusively by Guomai Culture (果麦文化) and went on sale in October 2026; any other version on those platforms is not official. The web version, EPUB and PDF in this repository remain free and receive updates first. The text is licensed CC-BY-4.0, and the repository also contains a separate LICENSE-CODE file for its code, such as index.html, selfcheck.html and the scripts under tools/. The last push was on 2026-10-21 and the repository is not archived. For readers, the practical rule is simple: if you found the book through a store listing that is not the Guomai edition, get the free copy from the GitHub release or the project site instead, since that is the version corrections reach first.

Editorial conclusion

HowToLiveBetter suits Chinese readers in mainland China who want a sourced option list for health, money, law and family decisions, and anyone who wants evidence-graded health entries they can trace to papers. It is a poor fit as a legal or insurance reference outside mainland China, and translations may trail the Chinese original. Before acting on any entry, check the cited source, the local rule and, for medical or legal matters, a doctor or lawyer.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. eternity4719/HowToLiveBetter on GitHub
2. Issues
3. License: Unlicense
4. Project website
5. README