Some unhelpful advice
Giving advice edition
Unhelpful advice
Nothing in life is more terrifying than when people ask you for advice. Bungee jumping after having a full Andhra meal feels easier than giving advice. That innocuous question by a fresh-faced kid on “what he or she should do” is a question that can unleash violent storms of insecurities and awaken that raging impostor syndrome that's only mildly dormant in me.
I'm sure this must be the case for many of you. When someone asks you for advice, the implication is that you must have done something in life. I don't know about you, but those annoying whispers in my head tell me the opposite.
If I am asked for advice on a very specific topic about which I have some competence, like finance, for example, I still sweat. Giving advice implies that you are intimately familiar with the life circumstances of a person and the context in which he or she is asking you for advice. That's rarely the case.
The other thing about being asked for advice is that it's a bit of a trap. Giving advice is weird. It involves a certain arrogance that you know enough to tell someone what to do, but at the same time humility that there's a limit to what you know.
When you're asked for advice, it's easy to let your ego expand like a rubber band and say random things you have no business saying. Nothing inflates your ego like someone thinking you know better. I know because I often fall prey to it.
My favorite piece of advice about giving advice is from the relentlessly thoughtful
: “Sufficiently caveated advice is indistinguishable from chaos.” I read this many years ago, but it's been forever etched in my brain.I guess the question was, what do you have to say about your 20s, or what advice would you give people in their 20s? And I am generally wary about giving advice— and maybe that’s my first “meta advice”, which is: very often, the problem with advice is that all advice is constrained by the utterances in the advice. Right?
All advice is context dependent to a degree that you may not appreciate until you encounter a different context. And another phrase I have is, “sufficiently caveated advice is indistinguishable from chaos”. For any piece of advice, there is often an opposite: “Take things slow? no, you should move fast!” Okay, how do you know when to do things slowly and when to do things quickly?
Over time, I've figured out a couple of pieces of advice that I can give without being deceptive or feeling like shit after giving. My go-to advice is to explore relentlessly and to do random things in life. “Fuck around and find out,” as the young'uns say it. What I am insinuating by this is that random exploration increases the odds of lucking into something one is passionate about.
Is it the best advice?
No.
Nothing is.
But in some loose sense, it may be helpful.
Why am I saying all this? I've long been a yugeee
fan, and I read this brilliant post last week, and I can't stop thinking about it. I've read it three times so far, and there's so much to unpack here. I can’t recommend reading it enough, but here are two of my favorite parts:For any job or path you choose there is no shortage of advice.
And your job is to remember that paths aren’t fixed, and this isn’t true. If there are no easy paths to take nor are there easy pieces of advice, you’re back where you started. Slightly blind and full of soaring ambition.
To find the path that works for you and the path that you would like to walk is not something that someone else can usually tell you much about. The best you can get are vague impressions of what worked for them, and maybe some stories of how life can evolve.
There are always vague answers that you can handwave to, like the necessity of being interested in more things or the importance of exploring before exploiting or being open to opportunities. Sadly, they're all true but none of them will help you figure out what you should do tomorrow.
Which means there's another way to see all this … that all advice is useful.You might not know how it’s useful, but it is. It might depend on the type of person you are, and what you want to do, and who you want to become, maybe even how you feel that particular morning and if you had your coffee, but the usefulness of the advice isn’t tarred by your inability to take it.
It’s a piece of distilled wisdom that, were you able to apply it, would make itself known to you after the fact. That’s what a lot of advice is. Wisdom that you can only really see from the other side.
This post is now my go-to thing to share whenever someone makes the unfortunate mistake of asking me for advice.
A comfortable robotic life
I loved these passages from
’s post.The most important part of my journey has been, without a doubt, an inward one. And I had to learn how to sit with the painful yearnings, how to accept their presence in my life and let them lead me into new experiences that have been far from 100% pleasurable. But I know they have been leading me in the right direction.
I remember hearing Brené Brown talk about how when we work so hard to keep out anything that doesn’t feel good, we end up flattening out our lives, accepting a vanilla version of existence because we can’t accept the darker moments. Thus, we rob ourselves of true joy. Because we can’t just have the ups in life; we have to have the downs, too. They come together—light doesn’t exist without dark; happiness doesn’t exist without sadness.
Looking inward sucks. It’s like watching a horror movie on repeat, which is why we’ll do anything to avoid it. Of course, people slightly smarter than me have been speaking about this since time immemorial.
Perhaps Socrates had the coolest take on this when he rather brutally said that an unexamined life is not worth living:
A. C. Grayling: Socrates, in his day, challenged his fellow Athenians to try to answer the question: what sort of person should I be? How should I live? What matters in life enough that it should shape how I live and help me to choose the goals towards which I act? And he found when he asked his fellow Athenians these questions - what matters? How should we live? How should you live? - but they hadn't really thought about it very deeply at all. He discovered then what many, many centuries later Bertrand Russell wonderfully encapsulated by saying, “Most people would rather die than think, and most people do.”
In the early dialogues of Plato, we do hear the authentic voice of Socrates, and therefore we know this one thing about what he did say: what he did say was that the life truly worth living is the considered life, the life chosen, the life thought about. In fact, he put the point negatively; he said the unconsidered life is not worth living because if you haven't thought about your life, your values, your goals, then you're living somebody else's idea of what a worthwhile life.
The endlessly fascinating Blaise Pascal had a badass way of putting it:
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
This quote is supposedly from Pensées (Thoughts), a collection of his notes and fragments, but it’s paraphrased. Here’s what Pascal actually said, and it’s much more brutal than the condensed popular quote:
Diversion.—When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distractions of men, the pains and perils to which they expose themselves at court or in war, whence arise so many quarrels, passions, bold and often bad ventures, etc., I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber. A man who has enough to live on, if he knew how to stay with pleasure at home, would not leave it to go to sea or to besiege a town. A commission in the army would not be bought so dearly, but that it is found insufferable not to budge from the town; and men only seek conversation and entering games, because they cannot remain with pleasure at home.
But on further consideration, when, after finding the cause of all our ills, I have sought to discover the reason of it, I have found that there is one very real reason, namely, the natural poverty of our feeble and mortal condition, so miserable that nothing can comfort us when we think of it closely.
Whatever condition we picture to ourselves, if we muster all the good things which it is possible to possess, royalty is the finest position in the world. Yet, when we imagine a king attended with every pleasure he can feel, if he be without diversion, and be left to consider and reflect on what he is, this feeble happiness will not sustain him; he will necessarily fall into forebodings of dangers, of revolutions which may happen, and, finally, of death and inevitable disease; so that if he be without what is called diversion, he is unhappy, and more unhappy than the least of his subjects who plays and diverts himself.
Hence it comes that play and the society of women, war, and high posts, are so sought after. Not that there is in fact any happiness in them, or that men imagine true bliss to consist in money won at play, or in the hare which they hunt; we would not take these as a gift. We do not seek that easy and peaceful[Pg 40] lot which permits us to think of our unhappy condition, nor the dangers of war, nor the labour of office, but the bustle which averts these thoughts of ours, and amuses us.
Reasons why we like the chase better than the quarry.
Hence it comes that men so much love noise and stir; hence it comes that the prison is so horrible a punishment; hence it comes that the pleasure of solitude is a thing incomprehensible. And it is in fact the greatest source of happiness in the condition of kings, that men try incessantly to divert them, and to procure for them all kinds of pleasures.
The king is surrounded by persons whose only thought is to divert the king, and to prevent his thinking of self. For he is unhappy, king though he be, if he think of himself.
This is all that men have been able to discover to make themselves happy. And those who philosophise on the matter, and who think men unreasonable for spending a whole day in chasing a hare which they would not have bought, scarce know our nature. The hare in itself would not screen us from the sight of death and calamities; but the chase which turns away our attention from these, does screen us.
Pascal talks about this multiple times, using different metaphors. All of them are equally searing:
Diversion.—Men are entrusted from infancy with the care of their honour, their property, their friends, and even with the property and the honour of their friends. They are overwhelmed with business, with the study of languages, and with physical exercise;[71] and they are made to understand that they cannot be happy unless their health, their honour, their fortune and that of their friends be in good condition, and that a single thing wanting will make them unhappy. Thus they are given cares and business which make them bustle about from break of day.—It is, you will exclaim, a strange way to make them happy! What more could be done to make them miserable?—Indeed! what could be done? We should only have to relieve them from all these cares; for then they would see themselves: they would reflect on what they are, whence they came, whither they go, and thus we cannot employ and divert them too much. And this is why, after having given them so much business, we advise them, if they have some time for relaxation, to employ it in amusement, in play, and to be always fully occupied.
How hollow and full of ribaldry is the heart of man!
Man is obviously made to think. It is his whole dignity and his whole merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought. Now, the order of thought is to begin with self, and with its Author and its end.
Now, of what does the world think? Never of this, but of dancing, playing the lute, singing, making verses, running at the ring, etc., fighting, making oneself king, without thinking what it is to be a king and what to be a man.
I can’t wait to read Pensées now.
More recently,
said this on a podcast:Tom Morgan:I think it's become probably overly fashionable to knock education. And I felt like I had a strong education and it gives people a menu of things to choose from before they know what they're interested in. And I think that's a really good thing. And it helps people lay down the foundation.
I think the danger is when you assume their menu is the only thing to choose from, right? And as you get older, you get stuck in this rut. And I think it links to your previous point, which is that... So what happens in my experience, having been in a lot of institutions, particularly around middle management is that people don't want slack in their day because it will leave them time to think about their choices. And I was that person, so I'm not looking down on anyone else. But you want to be distracted from that increasingly uncomfortable sense of dissonance that maybe it's time for you to go and do something else.
In the hustle and bustle of life, we often forget to take a moment, stand still, and let loose the violent demons that we’ve imprisoned in our minds with work and the endless pursuit of fleeting pleasures.
None of our lives are easy, and we all have our demons—some are more horrific than others, but we all have them. I don’t think we ever get rid of our demons. The best we can do is get to a place where the demons have less of a hold over us.
But to loosen the grip our demons have over us, we have to face them head-on. Otherwise, they continue to become powerful until they have devoured all that is good and wonderful in life. To do this, we must journey inward, as terrifying as that sounds. But it’s easy to write about facing your demons than actually face them.
Speaking of our inability to sit quietly and let our minds wander, I loved this passage from
’s post:Bertrand Russell. One of the essays is entitled “‘Useless’ Knowledge”, which commends the benefits of knowledge that has no practical application, no purpose other than to be enjoyed. I don’t think Bertrand Russell meant this knowledge as an accumulation of facts in our brains to vomit on occasion on innocent bystanders who just wanted to enjoy a beer on a terrace and made an inaccurate random comment about man’s landing on the moon, only to be utterly corrected with a flood of facts. I understand that he meant it like the “useless” knowledge that one acquires in the quiet of lazy afternoons when drinking the aforementioned beer and wonders when mankind stumbled upon the fact that fermented oats tasted rather good and then makes a mental note to go to the library and check out a book on beer and while leisurely reading this books, learns the origins of the name “beer”, and “cerveza” and why the words are so different, maybe one even starts brewing their own, the sky’s the limit. According to Russell, this is the type of knowledge that will allow one to enjoy the drink even more3 .
I've long had this nagging belief that some of what society judges to be wasteful is good for our soul. It's what makes us human. Is a life so stuffed with meaning and purpose that we start uncontrollably oozing and dripping it as we walk the life we should aspire to live?
On that note,
wrote a wonderful post on an efficient life, and this passage stood out for me:The demands of the efficient life require every day to be pretty much the same. Maybe you change it up on the weekends (though every article on sleep hygiene will tell you to for goodness sake don’t you dare wake up at a different time on the weekends or you will RUIN your sleep) but it’s pretty much the same all the way down. No wonder we have sad young working women on TikTok miserable about how they never get to do anything. These aesthetic wellness routines on Pinterest are lying to you. Joy is not found in a perfect routine that schedules your work and rest and self care down the very last minute. Joy is found in staying up way too late reading one night and crashing at 9pm the next. That’s how you do all the things. You have the hobbies, you take on the responsibilities, and you make room.
That means some days, some things don’t get done. Some days, you put off washing the dishes. And some days you don’t get around to writing because you’re too busy cleaning up and paying bills and selling books. It’s not very efficient. And that’s okay. You do not have to decide today what the rest of your life will look like FOREVER. You just have to do today’s work (and play) as well as possible, and tomorrow is a new day with brand new priorities.
Tyranny of the feeds
If you’ve read this newsletter for some time, you must have realized that I bitch and moan about social media a lot. If I did write something thoughtful about social media instead of just ranting like a lunatic, it would probably be about 17% as thoughtful as what
wrote last week:Last summer, I visited the Blue Ridge Mountains for the first time. An eight-hour hike in, my legs started aching. I sat on a rock and watched a creek glisten past my feet; the mountains were less blue from the inside, dotted with small, craggy, shocks of purple and yellow wildflowers. All at once, a murder of prehistorically-large ravens streaked black against the sky and landed a few feet away from me. I left the container of my body. All that remained was a rustling fear of the mountain around me, and the thought of what would happen if I were to lose myself here.
Here is my mini-theory of doomscrolling. For me, it is an attempt to access something vast, unexpected, sublime, the sort of thing that can shake me out of my body and replace the tesseracting, constellating, refracting, recurring nature of grief.
But a mountain and a social media feed are two different things. The latter is plastic, but it acts as if it is lifelike. A feed is large, but it is not infinite in dimension. Anything older than 24 hours is rarely revealed; history is resurfaced only occasionally; increasingly, it gets harder to go off-path from the main feed on your own.
Speaking of feeds and social media, if you were on the internet, you would’ve seen this image. It’s from this thought-provoking viral post by the amazing
.
The dopamine framing at once tells us too little and also claims too much. Why, for example, do we turn to the media of “dopamine culture” in the first place and what keeps us coming back long enough to get addicted (if that is, in fact, what is happening)? Are there no genuine human desires in play at all? Do we keep coming back because we are addicted or because we imagine that we have no better alternative or no good reason not to? What are the underlying fears and aspirations that might be driving our compulsive relationship to digital media? It seems to me that the dopamine framing is far too blunt an instrument to provide nuanced and adequate answers to these questions, hence it tells us too little.
It claims too much, I think, in painting a picture of hapless individuals at the mercy of large tech companies. While the compulsion and force of habit is strong, I think for most of us it falls short of being usefully called addiction. Consequently, we have more agency over the conduct of our lives than a dopamine culture framing seems to suggest. But if we have more agency than we’re given credit for, then we also have more responsibility. It may be tempting to believe we have less agency than we, in fact, possess precisely because it frees us from the burden of responsibility. I’ll let you be the judge of your own situation. For my part, if I have a disordered relationship with the internet, I know, in the immortal words of Jimmy Buffett, that it’s my own damn fault. Which is not to say that tech companies are benign or faultless. Far from it!1
One thing that made go, ooh
In the post above, Sacass quoted a passage from the great Hannah Arendt’s The Life Of The Mind. Here’s the expanded passage:
The mind can be said to have a life of its own only to the extent that it actualizes this intercourse in which, existentially speaking plurality is reduced to the duality already implied in the fact and the word "consciousness," or syneidenai—to know with myself. I call this existential state in which I keep myself company "solitude" to distinguish it from "loneliness," where I am also alone but now deserted not only by human company but also by the possible company of myself. It is only in loneliness that I feel deprived of human company, and it is only in the acute awareness of such deprivation that men ever exist really in the singular, as it is perhaps only in dreams or in madness that they fully realize the unbearable and "unutterable horror" of this state.
To watch
This was the year I realized that there’s something called philosophy, and it’s worth reading. Considering I know nothing about it, I’ve been reading various introductory books. Today, I accidentally rediscovered
’s YouTube channel, and it is a goldmine:
That’s it for this week.
Take a piss in the wind and say something philosophical.
By this logic, then, if we yearn for joy, peace, etc., we also have to learn to live with their opposites.
All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
Collective action problem. Moloch
Hardest thing in life is to have the courage to say enough in the face of horible status games, social pressures, desire to conform
Don’t misunderstand me—this problem isn’t solely on consumers. There needs to be a massive, systemic change at the corporate level for anything to improve. But we often decry corporations for their insatiable greed and perpetual expansion, yet we normalize such behavior in ourselves.
The prevailing sentiment seems to be, "It’s okay for me to keep going until I get mine." I’m not saying I am above it—I’ve struggled with it for years. And I’ve found that the more I focus on my own “growth” and money and material things, the more “enough” becomes a moving target that never really exists, just like it does for corporations.
Receiving advice has its own version of Newton's third law.
For every piece of advice there's an equal and opposite piece of advice that's equally valid.
The conventional wisdom by the way goes something like this. When you step out into the wider world you will encounter plenty of times when it feels like you're in the dark. What to do is unclear. Whom to believe is unclear. And the solution is to ask someone, learn from others. You must have read it too.
The problem though, as we saw, there are hundreds of pieces of advice from all manner of extremely smart and accomplished people, that all contradict each other.
Bhuvan- I enjoyed this exploration into being the giver of advice, something I haven't really thought of. I appreciate this thought-weaving process. Hope you're well this week. Cheers, -Thalia
Good one! Agree with Tom Morgan’s quote. Education has been downplayed.