Don’t take advice (including this one)

The only advice you'll ever need is to not take any advice.

I define advice as a suggestion given for a choice you have to make in your life. You should most certainly listen to teachings. For instance, if a science teacher teaches you that things are made of atoms, you can probably trust that piece of information. Teaching and learning are important processes to save time and encourage personal development by passing on useful knowledge from generation to generation. In fact, knowledge has a life of its own. You can learn music theory from your music teacher, musictheory.net, YouTube videos or your prodigy friends. There is a foundational truthiness to it. It's never perfect, but it's almost always good to learn more knowledge and even improve upon it yourself or teach others.

Advice on the other hand comes from people. Humans love to give advice. What could make you feel better than telling other people what to do? I mean, only smart and wise people get to tell other people what to do right? What a great way to boost your ego and look smart. I'm someone who loves taking advice. It's comforting to take advice. They must know what they are talking about right? I mean I have no idea, and if things go wrong, they are at least partially responsible!

Advice comes from a place of personal experience and the giver's observed reality; it is almost always bad for you.

Think about it, why would someone who's lived a totally different life to you, has a totally different personality, totally different body etc. etc. etc. know what's best for you? It plainly makes no sense. Here is an example from my life: I used to get horribly plane sick. Imagine spending hours and hours just vomiting non-stop and feeling nauseous and about to vomit in between actually doing it. It felt like someone yanked my entire stomach out of me and beat my face with it. To alleviate my suffering, my mum gave me the advice of drinking coke in the flight so the burps help me feel better, staying cold so I feel less like vomiting and fasting before and during the flight so there's nothing to vomit up.

It turns out, all three are the exact opposite of what you are supposed to do...

You want to avoid fizzy drinks since a leading cause of airsickness, or motion sickness in general, is feeling bloated in the stomach. On planes, as the plane ascends, air pressure in the cabin drops and you have a higher air density inside your guts than outside. All of this air trying to escape into the cabin creates the bloated and uncomfortable feeling. Coke contains dissolved carbon dioxide inside it, which is what makes you burp, but it introduces more gasses than it releases. This additional gas to your already bloated stomach makes it increasingly upset, leading to vomiting.

You also want to stay warm and comfortable, as motion sickness triggers your body's autonomic nervous system. As your eyes and the accelerometers in your ears disagree, your brain gets confused and triggers salivation, digestion and nausea. If you add uncomfortably cold to the equation, your brain is more likely to panic and cause you to vomit.

You want to have a small, light meal before flying. Fasting can lead to feelings of hunger, which stresses out your nervous system. It can also lead to lower blood sugar which does the same. On an empty stomach, you still produce stomach acid, which is what I threw up most of the time. It was highly unpleasant liquid and it burned my oesophagus.

The best trick of course, as I learnt much later in life, is that you can just buy motion sickness tablets from the pharmacy for cheap! It temporarily suppresses the motion sensors in your ears and thus reduces the conflicting eye and ear information.

There is a thin line between knowledge and advice. What's your takeaway from the above story?

Advice is people just yapping. Knowledge is backed by evidence or shared experiences across many people. Most pieces of information are a mix of both, often with some misinformation, misunderstanding and deception thrown in there too. My mum just didn't know any better. Nowadays with the ease of access to information, you can pretty easily fact check most things.

The skill underlying all of this is critical thinking. It's the ability to see beneath the surface and work out what is signal and what is noise.

People love to tell you how to think and feel. Politicians need to be good at this to gain votes. And yet, most people are looking out for themselves and know less than they let on. The world is a harsh and complex place. In modern society we all live comfortable, relatively sheltered lives but we are not very far time-wise from our warmongering ancestors.

Anyhow, in your day to day life, what can you do instead? Well, you can probably take a step back and think bigger picture. Why are they saying this? Where are they coming from? Does this apply to me? There's often some kind of information you can get out of even bad advice, perhaps just that the person telling it to you doesn't know your situation.

Don't be afraid to trust your gut and experiment. There were so many moments in my life where I clung on to any advice I could get and any help or clue as to what to do. Bad breakups, teacher from hell, conflict with friends, what to study in Uni. In retrospect none of the advice, ones I asked for or unsolicited, were really helpful in those situations. The situations were deeply personal and bespoke to me. What I really needed to do was believe in myself and trust my gut, and anyone else's ideas should be second to that. The truth is, nobody really knows the answer to these kinds of problems. You might as well own it and believe in yourself.