I love advice. I love receiving it. I love giving it. I love reading “how to” posts and “life hack” sites and pointing friends to them, too.
But unasked-for advice is an insidious evil, ruining friendships and destroying family relations and generally fucking shit up.
- The grandparent telling their kid how to raise their own children, all the time
- A friend asking an overweight friend “have you tried [something obvious like diet and exercise modification]???”
- Fanfiction comments picking apart stories that have been posted for funsies
- Healthy people telling people with chronic illness or injury what they “should” do to “fix” themselves
- Anyone anywhere to jumps into a convo about the problems someone is having and immediately starts in on what they need to do to solve the problem
- People with pets/children/jobs telling other people how to manage their pets/children/jobs
The list is endless, really.
Yes, it makes sense that people do genuinely want to help. There is often a backstory of “I had similar problems, this is what I did that solved them.” It’s a natural impulse to reach out with advice to help make a friend’s life easier.
As a fat woman, I get this all the time. Not from friends so much anymore, thankfully, but it’s happened across the board that I make a vague comment about being fat and the other person jumps in to assault me with advice. Like I’ve never tried [everything] before? As if I’m too stupid to google the word “weight loss”? As if all that hadn’t resulted in zero results?
The fact is that if someone has a problem, chances are good that they have tried almost every solution that could be offered to solve that problem. Hitting them up with a solution you think is special or unique is A) insulting and B) pointless.
Don’t do it.
DO.
NOT.
DO IT.
It was a hard, hard lesson for me to learn, but I’ve curbed the impulse by simply asking, “do you need advice, or are you venting?”
Sometimes, they need advice, or a sounding board; but most often, I’ve found, people are venting for the sake of working through their emotions. That is important too, and is something we should be grateful to stand in service doing, if that is what our friends need.
Doing what they don’t need causes more harm than good. Period. Always.
I’ve seen people quit writing stories because unasked-for critique ruined the experience for them. I’ve seen adult children all but cut their parents and other relatives out of their lives for interfering with their own pregnancy/adoption/child-raising. I’ve seen friendships crack under the weight of one friend assuming that if the other does not follow their advice to the letter then they just want to live with the problem.
Giving advice is great, but giving unasked-for advice is simply putting another burden on the person’s shoulders whom you insist you are trying to help. Because helping is doing what someone else needs, not what you think they need or what gives you the most satisfaction to help with. Unasked-for advice is more about the person giving the advice being seen as correct or a hero than it is about genuinely helping.
Unasked-for advice is, in sum, more about the person giving the advice than the person who needs help. Other people’s problems are not and should not be about the advice-givers ego.
[I am actually two posts behind now, as I fell off the wagon on Friday and Saturday with posting because…I’m not sure why. I forgot? Dunno. But I’ll be writing extra this week to make up the slack!]