[Even] the most definitive-seeming inventories are always undermined by a sense of their own arbitrariness. There’s an absurdity—a hysteria—that lurks between the lines of the most stern and sober of lists. Whoever wrote the Ten Commandments (or “10 Judeo-Christian Moral Injunctions You Need in Your Life Right Now”) was surely aware that it could just as well have been eight, or eleven, or seventy-seven commandments. (You get the sense that God, or whoever, could have gone on prohibiting and decreeing things all day, but that He was well aware of His people’s already compromised powers of attention.)
10 Paragraphs About Lists You Need in Your Life Right Now : The New Yorker