What Good is Advice?
Lamenting a lack of control
It’s very easy to give advice. You are put into the position of someone else, without the weights of their own life, and given authority over their actions. When we give advice, we give it from the being that we imagine in our heads but who so rarely comes into reality: someone stronger, smarter, with firm morals and a clear conscience. The fog of life clears when we give advice, and in its absence, we see how brutally simple most things are. If only they, the person we give advice to, could see! Compared to the complexities of our interpersonal lives, the lives of those we give advice to seem naively simple. We tell ourselves that if we were in their shoes, with their problems, we would have it all figured out.
Receiving advice is no easier than giving it. We feel a supernatural compulsion to affirm to those around us that we are, in fact, making the right decision. It isn’t that we’d jump off a bridge if a friend did, just that we want to know that if they were at the edge, they would jump too. We ask, and ask, and ask. We ask friends, family, and strangers about relationships, career moves, and the best thing on the menu. Mostly, but not always, we take the advice that best suits our priors seeing as ultimately, who knows you better than you? We can always write off advice as well-meaning but ill-informed, a reflection of the person giving it more than the person asking for it. So it goes, in one ear and out the other. Empty sentences that we push away while still believing that if “they” were in our shoes, they would have no other choice than the one we were always going to make.
Life is built off of advice. Review culture has incapacitated the minds of the American consumer, where the number of stars on an Amazon page holds power over billions of dollars. Consumerism is built off of a financial herd mentality that promises fulfillment and satisfaction, and perhaps most importantly, acceptance. Acceptance from a group of people who think like you, act like you, and give advice like you. A flat circle of agreement and conciliatory pats on the back, all to prevent that dreadful guilt and remorse from creeping into your mind. It feels a little too on the nose that we have digital billboards of our personhood created with the sole intention of reaffirming to strangers that we do, in fact, have friends. Texts sent and received asking for comments on a new Instagram post have become a de facto part of youth for many. The affirmation we get from the new Stanley Cup or a friend we don’t talk to but who comments a variation of “need to see you soon!” under our new post is a rhetorically different but structurally identical form of advice. Advice to the mysterious stranger that stumbles across our page that they should not be afraid to follow us and connect our social network with theirs.
Advice and affirmation are usually the same thing, in effect. We ask for advice to psychologically hedge our bets in case things go awry. We can point a finger, quietly, at the friend who told us that those shoes matched that dress. We can think to ourselves that if we had listened to our subconscious instead of them, we would be better off. It isn’t their fault, even, but rather a reflection of the seemingly simple nature of their own lives. Did they even consider that we had brown shoes in the closet? We know they didn’t, because they don’t truly care. Nor would we truly care if that friend came down with food poisoning after we recommended they check out the new Korean restaurant down the street. Advice is handed out as a form of social welfare, endearing us in theory to the issues and problems of those around us but ultimately serving to disconnect us from our surroundings as a whole.
No greater is this empty advice than in the world of love. Love, which I believe is better fit to describe a feeling rather than a state, is something innately primal. We cannot explain why we love the things and people we love, nor would we even be able to dissertate them in our own inner monologue if we tried. We just simply like and don’t like, love and don’t love. When we are the ones who have to reject a suitor, we do it with an almost blasé annoyance. Why can’t they get why we don’t like them? Why do they need a reason? Yet when the table is turned, we will crater our head into the sand and hope, however innocently, that the person we want will change their mind and see us for us. Our courtship is another kind of advice, an advertisement for ourselves with one singular customer in mind. We go out of our way to humiliate ourselves in love in the hopes that the person we want will want us in the same way we want them. Like advice in non-romantic matters, it doesn’t matter what we say.
You could be a cynic and say that advice is about control. We wish to control the lives of others so that they work in concert with our own wants and needs. Holding the hands of a friend or a partner as we jump off the proverbial bridge makes the landing far less scary. Whether it be a spontaneous brunch or cross-country trip, we would always prefer to feel that we are not launching ourselves into harm’s way without any form of backup. To some extent, this may be true. The experiences we have internalized, whether we know it or not, will always guide our inherent moral conviction and therefore the advice we give. A friend that is unfaithful with their partner may evoke a particular brashness in our advice if we ourselves have been the victim of an unfaithful partner. To this extent, advice is less about control and more about a feeling of social safety that we are all going the same speed and to the same pace. The sad and cruel reality is that we are not. Partners leave because of distance, friendships atrophy because of work, and we are the only ones who see it through to the end.
Often I will tell myself that there will be a day when I am twenty-three and that the problems of eighteen will look like the problems I had at thirteen. Twenty-three feels so young to me, and yet it’s so far away. For much of the daily chaos of life, this line of thinking works for me in expunging my self-induced stress. Day by day I can remind myself that for all my qualms about school, work, and life, I will one day be twenty-three years old. A bad grade on an assignment or the always awkward interaction where you and a stranger both pivot to the left and then both to the right are washed away in a mental sluice. Still, some events cannot be thrown away. Events that make me realize how little control I have over the peripheral lives of those that I care about or wish cared about me.
I enjoy being in control. That may be why I focus so much on my professional goals at the expense of some social opportunity. Bad situations are made better by being in control, just as good situations are made worse by the opposite. A lack of control invites anxiety and paranoia to establish themselves firmly in my decision-making command, commanding my actions in an almost supernatural way. I ask questions that I know the answer to, just to hear a friend, partner, or doctor say the answer in different phrasing. I act, in my mind proactively, but in reality neurotically, to events that have such a low probability of occurrence that I would be better off investing in volcano insurance. Life is not predictable nor perfect, though, and when unexpected bad things happen, the anxiety and paranoia spring anew, and as smug as ever. See, look at that, you weren’t prepared and you’re the worse for it! So the cycle repeats.
I am not a robot, though, and there are times in which I sacrifice control in pursuit of something greater. That feeling of taking your hands off the wheel is a particularly unnerving moment. Agreeing without resistance that another person has control, whether they asked for it or not, is a uniquely rare but all the more impactful occurrence. In these moments, with whoever it may be, we open ourselves to advice in its totality. We listen to the words that someone says with intense analysis, hoping to leave no room for subjectivity. When you said X, did you mean Y? We read their texts again, and again, and again to see if we missed a hidden message on the digital tea leaves. We have given up control.
All things in life end. Pets die, people die, technology changes, friendships end, your favorite restaurant goes out of business. We know this because, in the prism of our own reality, we have constant monitoring. When we decide to end a relationship, we can subconsciously prepare ourselves for the mental anguish that will follow. That isn’t to say these things aren’t hard; the expected can still be brutally unforgiving, but we have at the very least some notion of influence. There is no such influence when we lose control. We cannot stop a drunk driver from killing someone we care about, nor can we stop a partner we love from cheating while we are away. To acknowledge these facts would prevent the necessary emotional scab from forming over our fears that allow us to live in what is in reality a total lack of control. These are facts so omnipresent in our lives that they simply mandate some level of societal-wide fabrication in order to coexist.
You are told when you finish a piece that you should have a call to action. Something that ignites the reader with a sense of purpose and motivation that has been slowly built up by each previous paragraph. Another way to say this would be that giving the reader a sense of control over their lives can make your piece feel infinitely more impactful than simple lamentation. This is good advice for most themes and issues, but I want to argue for the opposite approach, as much for me as for you. Relinquish the need to always be in the know as it happens, to constantly have a next step, or to fervently believe that you can change someone’s heart as easily as you could their mind. You will be better off if you can.
