This Is What Your Unsolicited Advice Sounds Like
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
This comic seems aimed at tone-deaf people trying to get others to stop catastrophizing, and there’s a whole lot to be said for validating others’ experience (life is inescapably and terribly painful) and not trying to cram zen shit down people’s throats when they’re suffering. It’s not helpful.
In addition to that, unless you’re literally falling off a cliff, falling off of a cliff is a disempowering metaphor - it’s straight catastrophizing. If you’re literally and inescapably about to get hit by a semi truck, well. Why shouldn’t you focus on what you can control? Why not think warm thoughts about the people you love before you die?
Our brains generate lots of crazy, irrational things when we’re in pain. That’s inescapable - we don’t really control our thoughts. We do get to reality test them and choose whether or not to believe those thoughts, though.
People have been thinking about approaches to the same everyday problems for thousands of years.
Funny, my read was that the author is on the side of the catastrophisor, 'this is what your unsolicited advice looks like - you don't understand what a catastrophe the recipients in'.
Nobody ever gets a chance to give advice to someone falling off a cliff or getting hit by a truck. Isn't it the comic itself (at least) that's doing the catastrophising?
- Her: You know, maybe let's start doing X to improve Y?
- Me: Yeah, that's a good idea! But let's also talk about handling Z because without it, X will lead to less Y.
- Her: [confused] Why do you hate my ideas?
- Me: [confused] What? I just said I think the idea is great, it just needs a bit more consideration.
And then she's sad, and I'm confused, and X never happens. Despite trying to phrase my counterexamples in a very constructive way (instead of how we do it in industry: "but Z!"), they're being perceived as a rejection.
After couple of such I've finally learned to keep track of the corner cases in my head, accept the idea without the mentioning it, and only then, over time, bring up the counterexamples so that it's clear these are new problems to be solved, and not a rejection.
I do think many people attach emotional value to their ideas, and any perceived imperfections invalidate the idea as a whole. I don't have any evidence of this that might generalize, but personally I feel like I (and potentially many programmers) never attach _any_ emotional value to my ideas, because if I did then every single bug I face in my code would be a defeat rather than an opportunity to learn and grow.
I do attach _some_ value to my ideas, but I do my best to wait with that until I've thought about it a bit and scoped out its feasibility. Bugs I don't mind at all - they're either mistakes (which just happen due to complexity) or indications of insufficient understanding. What I find a bit discouraging is discovering, after starting to work on an idea, that it's bad, infeasible or requires an order of magnitude more work than initially assumed. But I try to see it as gaining knowledge about problem domain, not defeat.
I suppose I could frame it slightly differently: it's not about not having emotional attachment, but about not making an idea part of your identity. When someone points out a flaw in a cool idea you had, you're sad because the cool thing won't happen. When they point a flaw in your idea, it feels as if they're pointing a flaw in you.
Even more so to people that you don't know well.
You are overthinking the metaphors in the comic. They are just there to emphasize that the advice isn't doing the person receiving it any good (or is your premise that the person about to get hit by the semi will suddenly act differently having been encouraged to focus on the things they can control?).
At the same time, I sm tickled by the irony of you giving unsolicited advice about not giving unsolicited. :-)
Even though telling an individual who is catastrophizing to stop catastrophizing usually won't help them stop (and will often damage relationships), it is nevertheless the case that they'll be better off if they stop catastrophizing.
I took the time to write this here because it struck me that the people who would identify with this comic might benefit from the concept, and in a small way, hope that they can apply it to their lives to suffer a little bit less.
Better than giving unsolicited advice is gently sharing mental models that you think might serve a person better, and letting them make the choice to adopt them (or not).
> unless you’re literally falling off a cliff [...] it’s straight catastrophizing.
This is nonsense. There are plenty of examples of things that are horrible to experience and outside of the person's control and for them this kind of advice is absurd. For example, depression and mental illness. This goes for many kinds of physical illnesses as well. I suspect that may be where the author is coming from too. The implication of the comics is that the grave situation is actually real and actually uncontrollable which the sufferer actually knows as a fact.
> Why shouldn’t you focus on what you can control? Why not think warm thoughts about the people you love before you die?
The question is not whether they should but whether they can. There's no indication in the comics that the situations are not literally uncontrollable, only that the adviser is unaware of this fact.
Let's say e.g. someone's father gets dementia, and they've got to take care of them. They talk about how painful it is, and you feel like you've been thrown off of a cliff. Seeing that they're in a lot of pain, I try to help by saying "Look, you just need to focus on the things that you can control. Using metaphors like that is disempowering."
We both agree that this would be a terrible way to help. Watching someone you love die of dementia is a horrible experience. If someone is expressing dismay at the prospect of watching a loved one uncontrollably disintegrate, the only good responses are in the vein of "wow, that sounds incredibly painful. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help."
Nevertheless! The person whose father is dying has a choice about where they put their attention. Do they spend time thinking about how unfair it is for him to work his whole life and lose his mind the moment he's poised to retire? How unfair it is that they have to take care of this person, who never took care of them when they were younger? Or instead, do they focus on the things that they can influence?
I'm not saying it's easy to do - personally I find it incredibly difficult. But making the effort to calmly accept things as they are without labeling things as catastrophes has been and continues to be incredibly freeing.
You've made the same mistake again. The comics are about situations where the people have no such choices to make. To make your example fit, the person would have to be having compulsive thoughts about the unfairness of the situation or something. This is a real possibility. People with certain mental illnesses do not have choices over where they put their attention. Telling them to put it anywhere specific is a misunderstanding of the situation and unhelpful.
Perhaps where our models differ is that I think most suffering is second order. The first order bad thing happens, and it hurts. Then we think about it, and think about it in unhelpful ways, and continue to hurt ourselves further.
Except many mental illnesses, the example I'm pointing out for the third time now.
Moreover, you're advice is utterly useless to the person suffering in these situations. Again, we need yet another panel with someone being beaten to death with a pipe and you standing there saying "just direct your attention to..." (scream of "AHHHHHH"! overlaps the end of your thought bubble)
But that's not a universal position. Personally I've benefited immensely from exactly this kind of unsolicited advice, especially at a younger age, and it really did help me.
What this kind of work suggests is an attitude of, "My problems are so [explitive] huge that you can't possibly understand so don't even bother trying to help me". Well maybe you are the unlucky bastard with 6-sigma problems, but more than likely you're actually an average person with average problems, and should be grateful for the average words of encouragement (because that's really what these clichés are, they don't actually care if you take up yoga, they just want you to know that they're encouraging you) from your average friends and family.
But that’s probably just for simpler or longer term problems than falling off a cliff or an oncoming train.
There’s a lot of suffering in the world - especially right now. The universe itself can be especially cruel, for that matter. So personally I try to be kind and generous when I can.
For me, the quickest and surest way to reduce anxiety about some problem is to find candidate solutions. I don't even have to act on them, just knowing that there's a possible path out is enough for me to stop worrying (and sometimes do nothing, and then the problem solves itself, because it was never that big in the first place). But then it seems that a good chunk of the population just wants to have their anxiety validated (and their "catastrophizing", per the other comment in the thread). Which I guess would be fine, if it made their anxiety go away. But it doesn't.
I'll think about it more.
Furthermore (my GF pointed this out to me once) - do you ever tell stories about dumb shit you had to do, AFTER you resolved the situation? For example, talk about dumb hoops you had to jump through at work (after you've jumped through them), or some work around in some recipe (because you screwed up at the market)? Think about the motivating factors in telling those stories, and how telling those stories makes you feel, and what you expect in the form of feedback when telling those stories. It's not identical, but it can be similar to what's going on people tell these stories BEFORE resolving the issue.
Sometimes people engage in these situations for multiple reasons. They're looking for their anxiety to be validated, not because they want it to be go away (they're often perfectly understanding of the actual concrete actions they need or can take), but because they want to bond and share and be human. Does it make it all go away? No. But that's not what they're looking for - they're looking to discharge some bad mental state. They're not looking for the "real fix", they're trying to clear their heads of their immediate pain.
No one wants to be interrupted in the middle of a tirade about how stupid Verizon is to be told to switch to Comcast. No one wants to be interrupted while raging against ${politician} with "just vote against ${politician}".
Both approaches (identifying and following up on courses of actions to resolve situations, and short-term venting to keep the mind clear) should work hand in hand - they are complementary, not opposite. While it's tempting to say that clearly the actually resolving strategy is superior, because it could theoretically work in isolation (while venting will clearly not work in isolation in most cases), I don't think it's really realistic.
Anyhow, I hope your strategy keeps working that well for you.
In these situations I do everything to not validate the anxiety, but still be understanding of their feelings.
As somebody who had OCD, and sometimes sought out validations from others, I know it is was not beneficial for me to have somebody validate it. For example you wouldn't tell me it is valid that I cannot sleep because I didn't close the door just right (and yes, OCD anxieties are this frivolous); you would tell me I'm wasting my time and energy thinking about that (and yes, that is the advice that worked for me).
My solution to anxiety is to throw the anxious thought out. Like meditation techniques where you try to ignore all your thoughts, here you would just ignore the anxiety inducing ones. You just set your mind on more productive thoughts.
This has helped me out a lot with my wife, and it's something i try to be mindful of whenever i talk to ANYONE now -- men or women. This idea was helpful because it raised in me the question: is the person talking to you for you to help solve their problems, or for you to just listen and help them get it off their chest?
Although i'm still in the problem-solving mindset, looking at it in this light helps me to at least think of the person's needs, instead of my own desires.
The problem with those is that they're just pointers, handles to a set of complex reasoning and personal experiences - so you're unlikely to grok a given piece of folk wisdom unless you thought about it and already navigated a situation in which it would apply. So for a teenager or young adult, they sound trite. But for someone with a couple decades of life behind them, they're concise.
Now that applies to the kind of clichés you'd find in a dictionary. The kind you see in this article/comic strip? These are just pseudo-zen bullshit peddled by self-help industry scammers. They pretend to be actionable, but are completely empty. I wish people would stop with those - not on the grounds that unsolicited advice is somehow bad, but on the grounds that these particular pieces of advice are objectively useful only to sell books and training courses.
We don't know the author's actual motivations. They may be suggesting that you should think about how your message will be received before delivering it, ask before offering it, wait until it is asked for, consider how you say it, think about whether it is necessary to deliver, or to not offer it at all.
As for mental health advice, that's something altogether different. Unless you are extremely sensitive and have a solid understanding of human psychology (i.e. not this is what worked for me) and understand that person's background, offering advice is a risky proposition. Also note that giving advice is different from offering support.
Also, when this kind of advice came from my family, they were trying to minimize my problems (so they wouldn't have to do anything to seriously help), not help me.
Be more than words. If I am telling someone to seek professional advice, I would help them with the task in a meaningful way such as contributing financially, finding information for them, being their speaker or support for coming out to others. Ask them what they would need help with instead of guessing or provide options when they can't come up with something.
If you are close or live nearby, you can help with chores and food. Good food helps and it's easy to end up eating garbage when you are down.
I'm very open about things that I went through, and it validates people's feelings, and hopefully gives them some optimism when they see it's possible to overcome this.
I've got a few of my friends to actually seek professional help (and it helped all of them, at least a bit). And the way I go about this is first telling of the issues I had, and then saying that every single person (even the most normal person) would have a lot to benefit from occasionally going to a therapist. I also compliment my friends when I notice change in their behaviour.
I'd love to be able to help them financially as well, but as a student that is not an option.
I think this is important in understanding the issue here. It's not that the advice is bad, it's that it is usually tone deaf and timed wrongly, making it hard to be received.
And to be clear, the advice in the comic is bad advice when it's given in those contexts. For good advice that's shaped kind of the same way, I'd suggest reading "Peace is Every Step" by Thich Naht Hanh - lmk and I can send you a copy (It's on libgen). Alternatively, reading the stoics (as someone else suggested in this thread) would be a good place to start.
I basically make peace with the fact that hardships in life are unavoidable.
I had a similar reaction to these comics, though I think you captured my objection better.
> Personally I've benefited immensely from exactly this kind of unsolicited advice, especially at a younger age, and it really did help me
I suspect that this might be a factor of how apt the advice is to the exact moment, and how skillfully it is delivered.
Good advice is rare, and in my experience unsolicited advice is neither higher nor lower quality than solicited advice. This is of course anecdotal.
In the personal world where we love our family and our friends, you're damn right I'm going to give advice. And if we have to get angry at each other, talk past each other until we come to a better understanding of each others point of views, well that's the mess and the beauty of real human connection.
I'll end with an example. Someone in my boss's professional circle once had breath that smelled like poop. Everyone talked about this person behind their back, made litte gagging noises and mean jokes. No one ever said anything, because it's safest not to get involved. My boss got the guy's home address and wrote an anonymous letter. Said, very nicely, that people can notice and while maybe this person was already aware or had tried everything, a doctor's appointment could be in order to talk over options or diet changes if they hadn't already. And you know what? From then onwards, that person had good breath.
This is a cold and terrible world if we don't take care of each other.
What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?
In the second image the guy pushed his wife in front of a truck for endlessly micromanaging him.
In the 3rd image the guy had enough of her negativity and pushed her off the cliff.
In the 4th image the couple agreed to cash in on the life insurance.
In the 5th image the woman is years to late with her unsolicited advice but she finally speaks her mind.
If the advice isn’t to your liking, let it slide right off you. It will not make you feel better if you berate someone who’s ultimately trying to help you.
These situations are very, very hard to navigate if you didn't go through these issues yourself, so better just not give any advice and just try to listen.
I even had people tell me outright dangerous things, like telling me to stop taking medication. People who never had depression, had no contact with psychology except in high school told me this kind of advice. Even though I am certain some of the people who told me this wanted the best of me, quitting meds can have a wide array of unexpected effects, and even if the meds are not effective, this is still definitely a bad advice. Not to mention that meds actually helped me a lot.
Would you not be at least a bit annoyed if somebody told you to "just think positively" when you are drowning? To you it might sound ridiculous to make this analogy, as you don't see a person literally drowning when you see a depressed person. But to us it can feel exactly like this.
But in these particular situations, the sufferers need actual, physical help, not just bland words.
But there's no getting people to see that because they will see it when they believe it and their position is they will believe it when they see it. "The key is in the safe."
I do understand what you're trying to say. But sometimes the threat is imminent but you cannot see it, and many people will not talk openly about this to others. Somebody being dismissive of your problems can be exactly like person pushing you off a cliff.
[1] - https://www.hhs.gov/answers/mental-health-and-substance-abus...
I do, thanks for reminding me! I guess this comic is a portraying someone who has attempted suicide or is crying for help via suicide then? It would be nice to have that clarification.
I think it's disingenuous to equate death with people who aren't facing a life or death situation, like suicide.
[1] https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5f406669322964f142b45249/...
[2] https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5f4066699a557880d973bc91/...
[3] https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5f406667d1dbd65a6a995d23/...
[4] https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5f406667dcb11d2009b4d0f1/...
[5] https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5f406667165d4d7af1f9bd6f/...