The common definition of advice is the guidance of recommendations concerning prudent future action, typically given by someone regarded as as knowledgeable or authoritative. The dictionaries are out of date. Advice is an epidemic in our culture, thanks to information technologies, they are given so freely, cheaply, quickly and thoughtlessly that it has been almost completely devalued, and is most often apt to be both unwanted and useless.
Real advice, on the other hand, can guide and ground a life.
I often feel I’m drowning and running from a tidal wave of advice, almost all of it unwanted and most of it useless, hysterical or just plain wrong.
There used to be a widespread belief that people ought to mind their own business and offer advice only when asked. In general people sought advice from trusted family members, members of the clergy, or professionals like lawyers and doctors. The people who gave advice often had some kind of credential or experience. Knowledgeable people.
Advice is now almost like a disease, spreading virally across the boundaries of technology, and especially on social media, a new paradise for ideologues, obsessives, worriers and amateur wizards. On Facebook, there are countless home grown doctors, vets, healers and psychiatrists. None of them are trained as a rule, as it is considered unethical for the truly knowleldgleable professionals to diagnose strangers over the Internet.
That does not stop the legions of absolute experts on the lives and welfare of other people. Nor does it stop the hordes of people giving angry advice, a whole other category of modern psychosis.
On Maria’s journey through India, I was engulfed daily in alarms, tips, demands and recommendations, none of them sought or especially welcome. They ranged from how to survive a long airline flight, how much rest to get when she got home, when to get a motel, how to survive tainted food and bad air and stress and thieves and frauds.
On Facebook, the world is considered a dangerous place and people (like me) are presumed to know nothing, not how to survive a snowstorm, feed the animals, train a dog, walk in ice and snow, back up a computer, shop safely, stay dry. No problem can be reported or shared without a storm of instant advice.
Facebook has armies of self-appointed sheriffs who police the ether looking for flaws and dangers. It is a world of warnings and alarm.
I do not generally get good advice on social media, nor do I look for it there. I don’t know who’s giving it, and I tend not to trust people who offer it for free. I believe in science and expertise and experience. I am very careful where I get my advice. Good advice has been critically important to me, and I listen carefully to it.
I liked people who are trained. Or scholarly. A woman who goes to school for six years to be a vet is much more likely to help my sick dog than someone on Facebook who has nursed her beagle puppy back from a torn claw. I’m happy to pay for good advice, and good advice is rarely free.
I think the advice I really want and need is how to live a meaningful life, and I do sometimes get good advice on that from people who sent me powerful and thoughtful messages, stories from their lives, things they have learned. They are not trying to save me or warn me, just share their experiences. That has often been valuable to me.
To be honest, none of the best advice I’ve gotten has come from the Internet, but from the other world, the other side of technology.
The best advice I have ever gotten in my life has gone from three or four sources: Henry David Thoreau, Hannah Arendt, Thomas Merton, and Joseph Campbell. They are all writers and thinkers. They all valued solitude, independence, and the idea of a moral and meaningful life. They have all helped me to live a meaningful life, be a better husband, a better person, to make up my own mind, find a spiritual life, understand the stages of life, find the strength to follow my bliss, make good moral choices for myself.
These men and this woman did not spread advice on social media, or think in FB messages or 140 word Tweets, they wrote books, studies for years, thought long and hard and were considered in their judgements. Their advice often came from solitude and deep consideration.
Thoreau and Campbell have been most helpful to me in grasping the importance of a considered life.
Consider this from Campbell:
“I think a person who takes a job in order to live – that is to say, for the money – has turned himself into a slave. Work begins when you don’t like what you’re doing. There’s a wise saying: make your hobby your source of income. Then there’s no such thing as work, and there’s no such thing as getting tired. That’s been my own experience. I did just what I wanted to do. It takes a little courage at first, because who the hell wants you to do just what you want to do; they’ve got all sorts of plans for you. But you can make it happen.”
This is good, even wonderful advice. But most people don’t think it’s wise, they think it’s foolish. You will not get it on Twitter or FB Messenger.
I took this advice, and I was frightened and very much alone, but I made it happen. It does take a lot of courage and it is hard work and few parents or siblings or friends or spouses will support it. But it the pathway to a life of freedom and fulfillment if you can muster the strength and encouragement to do it. For me, the truth is this: personal fulfillment is the most secure way there is to live.
Henry David Thoreau me another important lesson – to never speak poorly of my life.
“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse.”
I do not ever speak poorly of my life or my work, I know it may be listening. That has spared me some of the poison of a negative and complaining and angry soul.
Campbell taught me about marriage. It is not, he wrote, a love affair. A love affair has to do with immediate personal satisfaction. Marriage, he wrote, “is an ordeal; it means yielding, time and again. That’s why it’s a sacrament; you give up a personal simplicity to participate in a relationship. And when you’re giving to the other person, you’re giving to the relationship.” Marriage is about the long haul, not the weekend.
Marriage is not about passion, it is about patience and empathy and flexibility and commitment. It is a constant negotiation, the work that never ends. About listening and growing, and yes, yielding, for sure. Love affairs rarely last long, good marriages can last a lifetime, depending on how hard one wants to work.
Campbell also wrote powerfully about the need for contemplation and solitude in any life, about space to think. “You must have a room,” he wrote, “or a certain hour or so in a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning (or on your cell phone), you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. this is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.”
Wonderful advice for me, I have taken it for some years, it is precious and valuable. Every day, weather permitting, I go to my bench in the woods to be alone and think. It is my quiet hour, for me. If I can’t go outside, I find a corner of the farmhouse, and be with myself there.
There, or anywhere, I don’t need for someone to write me and tell me they sell trax shoes that help on icy sidewalks (but not on muddy farms) or that computers can be backed up by software. Or be told how often sheep need to be shorn, or when animals should or should not be put down, or what to eat, or what medicines to take.
There is also the question of how to make moral decisions. There is little guidance from anyone about that, even on Facebook or Twitter.
But there is Hannah Arendt, the brilliant moral philosopher has taught me to try to do good and not to live by what others think, but by what I think. The only one I have to please is me.
“As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong suffer and spectator, is at stake.” Men can only experience meaningfulness, she wrote, only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.
Advice is given very freely in our time, and rarely by someone regarded as knowledgeable or authoritative. There is no such thing online as credentials or credibility. We are all groping in the dark.
We get so much advice we don’t even know how to process it all, let alone consider it.
Advice is one of the simplest things to give in our world, it just takes a few seconds on a keyboard and a click on the “send” button. In my life, advice is more serious than that, and I look carefully for it- it is out there – and take it more seriously.
That is the best advice I have ever given myself.
