Ask Lemmy

My math teacher, when I said I did not know how to do the home work: "Well, just do more math!"

How do you expect me to do more math, when I do not know how?

On hindsight, he was right... I should have re-done quite a bit of the math courses, properly, so that I would have had the basis to advance. At that moment, he did not have the time to help me, since he knew I had been left too far behind to quickly catch up. It just felt so stupid to teen age me. I ended up dropping out of the higher math courses and just did the basic ones. Ended up with great scores for the basic maths, with a far better mental health. I had been strugling with math for so long.

"Trust your gut" sorry but our gut means our monkey brain. If logic is an option, trust logic. Trust your gut only applies if:

• You are talking about fast situations where all you can do is react as fast as possible
• You are really stupid and your gut out smarts you
• You are extremely biased and so your logoc is flawed
• You are talking about food

"Calm down" when I am in rage. Works 100% of never.

"Just do it" is helpful in some cases, but mostly not. E.g. you think that a hobby is cool but you don't feel like you could start it? Just do it, take a course, try it out. It becomes unhelpful quickly when the realities of your life are just different. Telling in unemployed person with debt who is fascinated with flying to "just get a pilot license" ignores their reality. But telling a business analyst who's interested in manga but feels like this hobby would destroy his image, to "just do it and buy some mangas" is totally valid.

I have been struggling financially for most of my life and have received way too often the unhelpful advice to "just do it. Live a little." Just book that 100€ flight to Italy and see Rome. Just get a smartphone, everyone has one now! (That was when smartphoneplans were very expensive here and I couldn't justify such a high monthly cost. Yes I'm older.)

There is way too much "just do it" advise by people that live in their nice little bubble of a well-off, supportive family system and never realize that the only reason they can "just do it" is because they never had to eat rice with tomato sauce for 3 days in a row because there were only 10€ on the bank account by the 26th.

On a similar note, "just get a job, just learn something more profitable/in an industry with high wages" is also an often unhelpful advice. Not everyone can be good at everything. And not everyone can just uproot their lives and go back to school for a few years. Yes, some people can do amazing things like get a masters degree while working full-time and having kids. But this advise, too, ignores the reality of many people. If you have no support system or if you simply aren't cut out for the currently profitable jobs, you can't just magically switch careers. And even if you do: things change so quickly and there is no guarantee, that the currently well-paid job will still be like that in 5-10 years.

For me as someone with ADHD and Autism i could list so many. But the most useless defenetly are:

"Just use a planner"

"You can learn to reign it in, others have learned to do so too!"

"Dont throw such a fit over something that small! I only changed your routine/moved around your entire order"

"You just need to focus more!"

"Pull yourself up by the bootstraps!"

My old boss used to say: "there is never a good time. Do it anyway"

This was often about taking your holidays, visiting your parents, testing a theory, building a PoC, etc. Analysis paralysis kills success.

Go to bed early so you can get a good night's sleep. I have heard this so many times, and I'm convinced it was the cause of many sleepless nights. It's probably great advice for people with a normal circadian rhythm, but it's useless for those with a non-standard chronotype. That shit is baked into your DNA, and medicine currently has no idea how to change it. Especially since it's so much easier just to blame the night owl.

"Choose to be happy" This is advice I've heard from people on Reddit who have overcome their depression and say it's a choice. No, Happy, it is not.

Me - "Doctor, it hurts when I do X." X is a perfectly normal activity like walking, raising arm over head, etc

Doctor - "Then maybe you shouldn't do X?"

“You just have to be persistent”

That can be true but no amount of persistence is going to make Timothee Chalamet be interested in me as Im closer to his dad’s age and he’s not gay.

“Don’t worry, everything happens for a reason.”

That “reason” could be shitty decisions, power beyond your control, or sheer bad luck. But we all know it’s just thinly-veiled religious indoctrination.

IDK, I think "just do it" is actually pretty reasonable advice, for the most part.

Obviously, it depends

everything depends

but I feel like it applies to many aspects of life.

Sometimes you're scared or anxious about something needlessly, and it really is best to just go for it and figure it out later, no matter how much your brain tells you it's terrible and not worth it.

"Be yourself." Motherfucker, who else would I be?!

Just get over it!
Move on!

Because both pieces of advice are intended to play out on the advisor's terms!
So if you were to follow their advice with, "Cool. Get the fuck out of my life!", they'll be, "No! NoT tHaT wAy!!!"

I remember my friend being really upset that her long term relationship failed with her partner leaving for another woman. I remember trying to empathise saying something along the lines of, “You can’t ever really trust anyone no matter how long you know them.”

I still kinda believe that however it was 100% the wrong thing to say in terms of being reassuring since it implied they’d been naive which was not the case. Their ex had all the responsibility for their relationship ending.

"It is what it is"

"Just be yourself" without clarification.

There's something to it, but too often it is interpreted as "no need for introspection or improvement"

In the replies there willl be a lot of examples of advice that actually does work forna lot of people, but not everyone. They are valid examples of bad advice at the personal level because it doesn't work for them, but the advice itself is not bad advice in general. A lot of people do hold themselves back by not trying or do wallow in self pity (not clinically depressed) and most people can overcome those thing by just doing something, but not everyone can.

Like I have ADHD and I have tried enough memory tricks and failed at them to know adding more things to remember is counter prodictive for me, and that scheduling tasks only works up to a certain number of tasks in a time frame before being overwhelmed.

But there is one piece of advice that is actually the opposite of what the saying literally means and where the phrase came from. "Pulling yourself up by the bootstraps" was an example of doing something that is literally impossible. It was used as an example of how impossible the thing that was being asked of people was. Now it is twisted to mean that success is possible if you try hard enough, which is the opposite of what it means. It is literally the worst advice because it is saying "do the literal impossible thing'. .

Don't get mad! It doesn't help anything.

Tell someone "don't get upset" and they're gonna lose their shit

Tell them "don't panic" and they'll listen most of the time.

"You got this!" What kind of magic spell do you think that fucking phrase is?? That is one of the stupidest, low self esteem phrases in the last 50 years.

Pull yourself up by your bootstraps!