Few things seem to be as disdained as much as unsolicited advice. Yet, everywhere, from person to person, to broadcast communication, and all levels between, advice appears.
Sometimes it’s relatively benign, like somebody recommending a good restaurant. Other times it’s paternalistic, self-serving, “tone deaf.” We’ve all seen people, online or off, who might be giving their take on the best way to do this or that—how to navigate the academic job market, how to build wealth when you’re 22, how to find a romantic partner, etc.—and regardless of how thoughtfully the advice is presented, how modestly it’s phrased, people will judge the advice-giver. They’ll accuse them of ulterior motives, criticize their blind spots and biases and presumed biases, mock their own identity in some fashion, engage in “whataboutism” with all kinds of variables and edge cases. Public advice invites scorn, including when it’s generally good and given sincerely.
My own advice about advice is that it’s probably best given one-on-one, or in small groups, and given in a spirit that allows, maybe even expects, noncompliance. Good advice-giving, I suspect, doesn’t restrict but helps shape our mental experience, even after we might have ignored it and realize only in hindsight we should have listened to it after all. (I think this has to do with a form of freedom, which I’ll elaborate on a little more below.) That all said, feel free now to attack my character and tell me all the ways I’ve gotten things wrong.
Recently I watched a short video by Agnes Callard. Callard’s way of being a public intellectual stands out from the pack. Her own personal style has a kind of tempered loudness, unstuck from orthodoxy, asking weird questions with enthusiasm, whereas many public intellectuals, including those who very much want to make an impact, remain tasteful, respectable, muted. Whatever one thinks about Callard’s work or opinions, she’s undeniably willed her way in the world in a manner a lot of us don’t have the energy, flair, gumption, or imagination to mirror.
So what is the allure of giving advice? Why do so many people like to give it, even give it without being asked?
Callard doesn’t arrive at a definitive answer, but she suggests that advice—unlike other forms of help—doesn’t really cost anything. It costs neither the giver nor receiver.
I think advice rests upon a foundation, albeit maybe a make-believe one, of expertise, and beyond that, a certain kind of authority—not always the authority of a political figure. It’s not a command, though it may come from a source who could give a command. It could also be a source of reliability, like maybe of a friend or a routine. It’s authority that says, you can trust what I’m going to say about what will transpire.
This expertise can come from experience. (“I’ll tell those teenagers not to egg the house where the Rottweiler lives in the backyard. I learned the hard way.”)
Maybe it comes from long and careful study. (“As a scholar of X, I can assure you readers of public debates in this topic that this is the real significance…”)
Maybe it’s bullshit—like when Gary Neville tries to give his thoughts on managing a football club. This is all relative: Gary Neville doesn’t know much about managing a club successfully, but he certainly knows more than I do, and I know more about it than my cousins in Idaho.
Advice involves a symbolic relation to authority, which may or may not be legitimate, and may or may not feel legitimate.
The way my life is now, I have relatively little unstructured free time in which I can sit comfortably and write, read, research, think, pace around, chat with people over coffee, be on video calls, etc. I have pockets of time, an hour here or there, perhaps, when I’m able to devote some attention to things. But there’s usually a trade-off. For instance: often, the times to do my own life-of-the-mind stuff come very early in the morning, when I’m bleary and groggy, or at the end of the night, when I’m ready to get to bed. My alertness and energy are almost entirely reserved for things other than my own “calling,” if you will. I want to be thinking about, and engaging with, Bactrian art and Dogon cosmology and Eugenie Brinkema’s film theory and Ernie Kovacs’ TV sketches, but I have so little opportunity to fit these big and little interests into my daily existence.
Now, I could try to further optimize my time management. For a lot of the past decade of my life, in fact, I have introduced new habits and tweaked my routines and generally been on a persistent self-improvement kick. (It’s been fairly successful. I’m a much more proactive person, with a stronger “work ethic,” and yes, better time management skills, than I was in my 20s and early 30s.) Maybe I could ask you, whoever you are, for your advice on how I might do this. Maybe your guidance would be fantastic. Maybe you’d have excellent tips.
But I somehow think I would be left less than fully satisfied, just as you would be if you had the same issue, and I shared with you all that I’d learned. The reason for this probably has to do with our desire for a remainder, a surplus, an excess, in other words, a leftover sort of emptiness in our lives that encapsulates and symbolizes our leisure. Leisure orients us to plenitude. We’d all enjoy more of it than we have, and there are external realities we can’t change, no matter how much we optimize our internal selves.
Don’t misunderstand me; I still think it’s beneficial to try to habituate ourselves toward the good (whether we cite Aristotle as our inspiration or not). But the reason none of us is ever fully satisfied with advice, including even good advice that we like, is that it lays out for us action or orientation and in so doing would seem to rob us, symbolically, of the freedom we have to do something ourselves or otherwise do nothing, to have the externalities themselves slump into the patterns of our lives rather than the other way around, the way of reality. It’s a reminder of our finitide as well as our incompleteness.
This is, I think, a problem that is really key in the growth and integration of the adult self, but also in the politics. (Though I’m not sure it’s key in the same way, with the same lesson.)
Sooner or later I’ll keep tugging at this thread …