Stop Giving Me Advice
On unsolicited advice, performative success, and learning to shut up
I went to the locked in factory and no one knew you. It's true, a factory full of diligently buzzing worker bees, with heads down, Macbook apples aglow, phones on do not disturb, and social media time limits set—and no one recognized your name.
I scanned rows and rows of noses tucked deeply into copies of Think and Grow Rich and tapped on the shoulders of every headphone-wearing podcast listener, yet revealing an ear still prompted no reaction.
I even went as far as to knock on the door of the Chief Officer of Standing-on-Business, your name didn’t ring a bell. I scanned every desk, watched every Instagram story with a black screen filled with plain white text reading ‘moving in silence’, visited every turning mill, and asked each person on the grind about you—and yet, nothing.
Everyone wants to be a self-made-something these days, so much so that the performance around what it looks like to be a successful person is at times more recognizable than the results.
Gen Z has collectively decided that we do not dream of labor, of cubicles, of nine-to-fives, and of commutes to and fro suburban towns and intercities. We crave self-driven, impassioned careers, incomes without ceilings, and schedules that don’t require you to ask for permission to go to the dentist—we want to be in charge.
Coming to the realization that the education system is not built to foster these lifestyles and career paths, but instead churns young people through a machine that readies them for the corporate career and its side effects of paycheck-to-paycheck living and tight hip flexors, has created a movement of young people chasing entrepreneurship and creativity using the digital world. The internet creates a pathway for people to become whoever they need to be. The ability to pick up any skill or access any piece of information is as simple as searching:
“How To Lose Five Pounds” … “How To Make A Million Dollars” … “How To Find Your Purpose”.
Results multiply instantly ranging from expert opinion peer-reviewed work to self-help books, to Twitter threads. There is an entire industry and online culture centered around advice—giving it, receiving it, and resenting it.
Anyone with internet access and an Instagram account has come across the “grind” content—billionaire morning routines, inspirational messages about the value of hard work, tutorials on how to find and build a side hustle, text posts with short, stern messages, and countless other pieces of media. The messaging around what a successful person is meant to look like is clear, but how often are we actually putting these ideals into practice so much as we babble on about them and their power?
2020 was the year of the self-help book. With society shut down, people were left to reckon with themselves and the small community around them, if any. With endless titles on an array of topics, for every problem, there was a solution in the form of a bound book with a sans-serif font, and a bold-colored, organic shape-filled cover.
Up until recently therapy was highly stigmatized and written off as reserved for only the “crazy” or rich and miserable. Self-help fills the gap between naggy, at times baseless advice from the people in one's life and professional, degree-holding derived help—a sort of, ‘we have therapy at home’ approach. Self-help book titles tripled from 2013–2019 (McLoughlin 2022). The availability of mental health, self-development, career growth, and lifestyle improvement content turned many into mini experts as they took this written and recorded content from field experts and condensed it into bite-sized clips perfect for TikTok and Instagram. These tidbits continue to circulate and grace minds everywhere with contextless life improvement tips and tricks. ‘I heard it on TikTok’ is now a legitimate source I hear, and use, so often. Strangers online gather and spread these information breadcrumbs often without trial or true implementation into their own lives.
I am someone who chronically runs their mouth, and while it’s no crime to be stupid out loud, it also doesn’t add anything to my life or the lives of the people around me. In some ways, I may be wise, but a lot of it is me reading, watching, and regurgitating content from people online who may or may not know what they’re talking about. The more short-form content I consume on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok over the last couple of years, the more I have had to stop and catch myself blurting out the information I heard out of context in these videos without spending more than a few minutes thinking about or researching.
I find myself clicking through stories of the “grind” style content and they always leave me with a pit in my stomach. A fear arises that my lack of productivity in the moments I spend scrolling will prevent me from achieving my goals or worry that I’m lazy because I don’t have a big project to post about or a business I’m building behind the scenes. This internal pressure builds and I find myself spiraling over who I am, who I want to be, and where my online persona fits in the mix of them both. With time, I am learning to have trust in my journey and not lose faith in my ideas just because someone else has presented another approach—for me this looks like being more picky about where I place my attention, more diligently researching topics I’m curious about, and realizing there is a lot of value in at times staying silent, sometimes the conversation calls me to simply shut up, and that is okay. Not placing the burden of unsolicited, often misinformed, advice on others takes away a lot of my anxiety toward being on the receiving end of that dynamic.
The unsolicited advice that I see online or receive from people who I don’t really know is more of a trigger and at times an annoyance than anything, but it’s led me to stop taking everything I’m told as end-all-be-all truth, and instead first asking myself ‘why should I listen to you?’Not out of ego or stubbornness but a genuine question—what credentials and experience does this person have to speak about this area of my life, what morals and character do they carry that I would like to emulate, am I inspired by the way they live and carry themselves? It’s also helped me stop myself from dumping my own half-baked advice onto others unprompted. I want the words I speak to hold value and add dimension to the conversations I am a part of, and I want to feel like a true product of the advice I give, able to show and not just tell.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution to achieving success, nor is there a cut-and-paste definition for what success is supposed to look like. Social media can easily convince us that there is a distinct formula—a morning routine, a uniform, or a particular way of speaking— that is undetachable from the concept of success. On top of that, there is a pressure to prove to one another that we are always working—busy, locked in, on the grind, toiling away at some grand project. In reality, the results will always speak for themselves.
Sometimes, most of the time, our only job is to be a support and listening ear for one another, for the rest—there are people for that.
Kiera…this was perfect.
You worded this very well! A great awakening read, thank you!