There's Too Much Advice

Most advice sucks*.

With the internet, we saw the ushering in of the information age. Smartphones put the world’s knowledge in our palms; social media let anyone broadcast it to millions, with little care for nuance.

That brings us to our present. Everywhere you look, every feed you scroll, someone is offering advice — invited or not, fact-checked or vibe-checked, nuanced or utterly flat.

Most of it is terrible.

Even if it’s good, I think it’s damaging us in ways few people realize.

I’m just old enough to have grown up with the internet, but without the pervasiveness of social media. I joined Facebook when I was 11 (by lying about being 13, sorry Zuck). In those days, social media mostly meant unfiltered slices of life from your friends and acquaintances. Tag your friend bingo templates (remember those?), posts about your new level in Farmville, or some new music you just heard. No one was trying to shove how you should live your life down your throat. You did something you thought was cool and worth sharing, and you shared it. End of story.

That era felt like the golden age of social media, more bulletin board than billboard. MySpace and Facebook embodied an almost natural extension on connecting with people. I recall joining gaming forums and writing utterly cringe-worthy blog posts, which I look upon with both fondness and disgust now. But at least there was no one to tell me 10 ways to fix my morning routine so I can write better. I did something, in my own way, put it out there, and then learnt from experience to make it better.

Perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe it’s rosy retrospection, and it wasn’t all so perfect. However, if the problem still existed then, it exists a hundred fold now with the all-encompassing presence of social media. It’s all become so black and white when really there’s a whole lot of gray there.

Today, open Instagram, Twitter (long live Twitter), or YouTube, and it’s like walking into a pharmacy that only sells life prescriptions. You’re sitting wrong. You’re eating wrong. You’re sleeping wrong. You’re working wrong. Apparently, you’re even relaxing wrong. Every scroll feels like a fresh reminder that you’re somehow doing life incorrectly.

These prescriptions are not always explicit. There’s definitely the pervasiveness of the self-help culture that espouses quick fixes and hacks to solve your life. That has been there for longer than social media. However, I think a lot of people have developed a bullshit radar on advice like that, and so it doesn’t end up being as harmful.

The problem goes way deeper. It’s not just the self-help gurus anymore; it’s anyone who shares their experience as though it’s the blueprint for life. Don’t you see they’re having so much fun/success doing it? So why don’t you do it too? The travel influencer who decided to quit their job and travel the world, who, without actually saying it, implies that this is the “right” way to experience life. The “nutrition expert” who suggests you’re eating wrong because it’s not exactly the macros they follow and prescribe. The hustler who puts on deep motivational music in the background and goes on a rant on how you’re wasting your potential because you just won’t take “control of your life” like they want you to.

I don’t think much of this is out of malice. I think we live in an era where most, both the creator and the consumer, are filled with feelings of inadequacy. We’re just looking externally to overcome that feeling. The creator espouses so that people will listen and appreciate it, so they feel validated. And the consumer feels validated because their favourite creator with so and so followers is saying so.

One sign of this advice overload is how quickly trends turn into anti-trends. The pendulum swings so far that we end up needing to “normalize” what was already normal. This is most apparent in the travel space to me, where there has been a rise of a whole sect of influencers trying to “normalize” the 9-5 again. I mean, what’s there to normalize about it? It’s how most people live. It is already the norm. But people got so advice-addled about hustle and travel and life, that there arose a need to show people who felt inadequate in their 9-5 that it’s okay to live that way. In fact, that’s how the majority of people do it, and you can still live a fulfilling life. But the question is, did we need to go through this cycle in the first place?

There’s a lot of nuance lost with our permeating advice culture. People crave quick fixes and end up adopting cookie-cutter answers that ignore their own circumstances. Very few creators take the care to mention nuance in their “gospel”. Should you listen to them? Maybe. But experiment and evolve that advice to see how it fits for you. And if it doesn’t? That’s okay, you figured out what doesn’t work for you. Instead, creators want you to feel that you’re missing out if you’re not living the same life because it generates clicks and makes them feel validated. In the end, we start turning into templates of each other, following trends not out of joy but out of fear: fear of missing out, of being left out if we don’t live the way our favourite creators do.

The change has to come from both sides. Creators need more nuance; consumers need more self-trust. Your life is a unique set of circumstances, what works for someone else might not work for you, and that’s fine. There’s no prescribed path. Experiment, fail, learn, adjust. Advice can guide you, but it can’t define you.

In the end, I feel this will lead to all of us being more interesting people.

P.S. In a way, even this article is advice. Feel free to ignore it if you think I’m overreacting. Thanks for reading.