At a time when it often feels as though everything is urgent, a mess, unmaking itself around us – and when truth and relevance are dictated by algorithm without reference to our wellbeing or general sanity – I shared a picture of my cat on the internet. Silly cat photos remain one of the good and pure things in the online hellscape. “No controversy or divisiveness here,” I think. “Just a photo of a little cat doing a funny stretch. A balm to the wounds in us all.”
Within 40 seconds, some woman comments: “Be careful. A lot of plants are poisonous to cats.” Something in me snaps. It might be my sanity, my equanimity, my faith in human goodness. It might be the mini KitKat in my back pocket, which I have now inadvertently sat on. It’s the existential exhaustion of this stranger’s tedious response to something harmless, imposing itself on my day like someone farting surreptitiously in a crowded lift.
As I sit upon my crushed, gently melting KitKat, I consider this tiny piece of unsolicited advice – an unavoidable consequence of living within the panopticon of social media, yes, but also of being a person around other people. We love giving unsolicited advice, and we almost universally hate receiving it. It is the junk mail of human interaction. A sort of psychological spam we are burdened with sorting through and deleting, lest it take up space needed for valuable things such as remembering to collect your children from that after-school thing next Wednesday or recalling how to ask where the bathroom is in Italian.
I don’t respond to the woman’s message. I do, however, feel moved by the spike of irritation in my guts to consider why it is that unsolicited advice is so particularly irritating, and why it is almost always a bad idea.
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It’s uninvited feedback on some element of our lives – what we’re wearing or how our body looks or how not to poison a cat we’ve been successfully not-poisoning for years. It’s the sudden interjection of a stranger’s ego under the pretence of concern or moral duty. Sometimes, it’s an act of love – someone close expressing legitimate concern to suggest that we might enjoy the Hobbit movies, actually, or should consider the possibility that we’ve become addicted to gambling online. Not all unsolicited advice from people we love and respect is automatically helpful or good, but it’s more likely to be based on real knowledge and genuine concern. It’s less of an elevator fart.
Unsolicited advice is inescapably egotistical. Who am I, after all, to presume to tell you how to live? I can think that your hat is kind of weird or that your perpetually filtered social media posts signal insecurity, but these are inside thoughts. They are not primordial truths but impressions
They’ve earned the right to share their thoughts and hopefully won’t abuse it. But SusanBarbaraKaren or JohnJamesJeremy on social media, or the stranger at the bus stop, have not. Their expectation of access registers as an affront. Their suggestion that we should never feed responsibly cut carrot batons to a toddler or that our shorts look frumpy and would be better with a lower waist, is annoying. It presumes an access, an understanding and an urgency that SusanBarbaraKaren has no right to expect, whether she’s a colleague we barely know or a self-righteous internet scold.
Unsolicited advice is inescapably egotistical. Who am I, after all, to presume to tell you how to live? I can think that your hat is kind of weird or that your perpetually filtered social media posts signal insecurity, but these are inside thoughts. They are not primordial truths but impressions. These impressions can be ungenerous, inaccurate or unhinged. If it occurs to me that this particular shade of lemon doesn’t do much for your skin tone, I should not say it aloud. I should let the idea ebb away, leaving you to judge for yourself which colours you like to wear. What possible reason is there to express such a thought, apart from an arrogant assumption that you’re doing life wrong, or that my knowledge is superior to yours? It’s verbal incontinence; a draining imposition on another person so that we might use them to feel enlightened or important in some way.
There are few universals in life, but “don’t give advice nobody has asked for, and absolutely never give advice to someone you don’t personally know” may well be up there.
If you’ve consented to read this column, by the way, that doesn’t count as unsolicited advice. Probably. Nevertheless there are plenty of philosophers who would suggest that unsolicited advice is a bad idea. Epictetus would tell us to mind our own business. Simone de Beauvoir would suggest women get more of this nonsense than men, and that tells us something else about it. John Stuart Mill would say someone is exercising their liberty in wearing a weird hat, and not hurting anybody, so keep your trap shut. Even Kant would tell us not to use others as means to an end, like a hippo scratching its bum against a tree of self-satisfaction. I’m not sure we need them to, though. I’ve lost a perfectly good bar of chocolate and my cat lives a life vaguely comparable to that of Henry VIII, without the sugared wine and uxoricide. We’re grand.
