What is the most unhelpful advice you have received?
I’ll go first: “You have to have children when you’re young,” told to me when I was in my late 20s, with no desire to ever have kids, and no means to support them, by someone divorced multiple times with at least one adult child who does not speak to them.
Also: Responding to “How do I deal with this problem?” questions with “Oh, don’t worry about it, it’s enough that you’re even thinking about it!”
2 days ago we had a moving up ceremony, and the speaker said that the secret to a successful life is “Honor your parents and Honor God”. That advice wouldn’t apply to everyone…
Idk man, I’ve never gotten married and it’s been fine for me. My girlfriend and I have been together for 14 years, have 2 kids, and our family is all that has kept me going through this shitty world. Never married though, so many there is some truth to the advice.
“Just be yourself and you’ll make lots of friends at your new school.”
Four years of constant bullying and loneliness later: I have one acquaintance that would eventually become my friend after a few more years. I also have basically no self-confidence, and my social development is set back half a decade as I’m still looking for friends to have sleepovers with when everyone else has moved on to normal teenager stuff.
I’m 33 now, I don’t remember my sleepovers and all of my highschool friends are gone. We see each other every now and then when it’s convenient, but the new friends I made late 20s are the people closest to who I am now.
You aren’t “missing out” and feeling like you are is only going to make your confidence issues worse. High school is not what defines who you are.
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment. (Markus Aurelius).
You have the power to feel confident by altering your estimate of pleasing people. Please yourself, confidence and everything else you feel you want will come much easier. Good luck!
Particularly devastating when you reflect on a lack of success after following this advice because now you can no longer think you were a victim of unfair circumstance or something external, but rather, you are , at your very core, just unlikeable. After all, you were yourself and it turned out nobody liked you.
That said, I think it’s only bad advice in as much as it’s glib and shallow, but I can’t exactly fault it per-se. I mean, I can’t really say the inverse is particularly healthy either. We’d think an adult telling a child specifically not be themselves would be pretty fucked up, but in any case, it’s just horrible advice to give because it doesn’t prescribe any actual changes one can enact that would result in a different outcome and the advice is insidious because of the implications for the any lack of success you encounter when following it. The other problem is that, you were already being yourself when you sought the advice, and you mostly can’t really help but be yourself even when trying not to because you ultimately become yourself trying to be someone else rather than someone else and that doesn’t doesn’t tend to work very well since if you could have been someone else you probably would be them rather than yourself given how much being yourself has sucked of late.
While I hate that advice though, I can see why it’s tempting to give and also how tricky it is to have anything useful to say, especially to a child in school. School is such a hellish jungle. It’s an environment so ripe for cruelty and all the worst of human nature at the very worst time for people to be exposed to it and there’s so little one can say that really does help because it’s such an inherently difficult situation to do anything about. You have to be there for years, you can’t rely on any level of maturity at all because the perpetrators of the cruelty are often your peers who are children, none of the adult world’s methods of navigating this type of situation are really applicable and the whole institution breeds an environment where this type of thing is such a regular occurrence that the best, kindest and most well meaning staff have to build a kind of immunity to it or risk emotional collapse from empathy for all the children that go through this every year and then you have the staff who are not good people, who don’t have empathy and are perpetrators of the cruelty itself whilst charged with the care of the children. This turned in to a big ramble, but yeh, school, fuck school man.
Nah that’s actually useful. May help the other person remember if they saw it/moved it/whatever or at least gives them a place to start helping you look for it. If they don’t know they wouldn’t be able to help question or not.
I like reminding my colleagues they don’t get paid more for working harder.
Probably why I didn’t get that manager promotion though.
Being perceived to work hard and identifying what’s important to your manager / director is second only to being their mates. Good lunk in your endeavours!
When I used to make notes because I don’t retain information instantly my boss said “Just don’t forget” I exclaimed: “Thanks, I’m cured!” The office got a laugh but it still bothers me that he thought it was a choice
For me it’s the opposite, at school I was forced to take notes. Teacher would give me bad grades if they saw me not talking notes. But notes are completely useless for me, and if I take notes I don’t understand the lecture. So I started the habit to sketch on notebooks pretending to take notes. Schools can be pretty stupid
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