You only need to take a quick scroll through any social media platform, to appreciate just how much of a culturally embedded behaviour advice-giving has become, especially in recent years.
Everyone from Jo Blogs to John Doe seems to be doing it! Pushing out their pearls of wisdom for public consumption, and buying into the idea of 'usefulness' as a success marker.
Personally speaking, this mainstreaming of muses and motivators, and the omnipresence of pedestals and soap boxes, it’s a little ick-inducing, to say the least.
After all, I’m of the firm belief that advice ‘is a form of nostalgia’ - to quote the famous Baz Luhrman saying - and that ‘dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.’
I appreciate that there are many exceptions to this rule. There are times when advice does come from a place of knowledge, experience and wisdom. A place of heard-learned understanding of how best to exist within the world.
I wouldn’t say I’m without any of these credentials, necessarily, or that my reluctance to jump on the life-coaching bandwagon owes to an absence of anything insightful to offer, per se.
What I would say, however, is that it comes from a place of reservation.
Maybe even scepticism.
After all, there are just too many caveats to the concept of ‘good’ advice.
Too much scope for contraindications, when swallowing someone else's magic pill for success.
To join the leagues of advice-givers, therefore, seems immoral at best… a minefield at worst!
Not only this, there’s something about the idea of pontificating on the portals, that implies a certain superiority - something which I most certainly don’t attest to, let alone want to try and leverage for likes!
On another note, I do also believe that to champion too much this idea of ‘do as I do’, is to detract from the art of self-culture, and the idea of developing capacities off one’s own steam and mistake-making.
For this reason, much of what you’ll read on here is autobiographical. Not to be interpreted as prescriptive, but maybe (maybe) intended to plant a seed or two of something salient or relatable… to take from what you will.