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!”
I was in a “troubled youth” cult for many years. “Unhelpful advise” is an understatement compared to the heaps of fear-driven doctrines and rituals we had to follow, lest be homeless. I could go on for days about this topic, but the biggest “unhelpful advice” was to cut all of my childhood friends from my life completely, on the basis of “my own good.” I am now a virtual stranger to them, and although I’ve somewhat made amends, nothing will ever make up for our lost years.
I was a new dog owner, went to /r/Dogs to ask about a particular behavior my dog was exhibiting I’d never seen or read about before (turned out to be normal tho) and every reply I got basically told me I don’t know how to care for an animal and that I should give him to someone else.
It was then I realized that it wasn’t just /r/RelationshipAdvice that was full of bitter, jealous losers whose advice is always “dump them.” It applied to literally every single subreddit dedicated to advice. They may have started with good intentions and knowledgeable people, but over time filled up with people who had no business giving anyone advice.
Oh yeah even lifeprotips, if you go in the comments it’s just full of people grasping at straws to find the tip useless and upvoting each other’s cynicism
There was one: “If you want a fridge’s compressor to turn on and off less frequently (ie: if you sleep in the same room), fill it with water bottles to increase thermal mass” and the top comments were “Actual life pro tio: get an apartment with 2 rooms???”
I was like: are these people actually that slow?
The less there is to say about an advice, the less reasons you have to go write a comment. Therefore the people in the comments are often outliers
As a fellow dog owner, the internet always seems to be the most judgemental place to get dog advice. If you dont spend 6 hours a day training your dog, feed the top of the line kibble, and vax them for diseases only 3 dogs have got ever, then you dont deserve to have a dog.
People get so hand-wringy about what dogs can and can’t eat. Like I’ve had people tell me not to let my dog eat apple because there’s a chemical in apple seeds that’s converted to cyanide in the gut.
Like, first of all, I’m not feeding the seeds to my dog, and second of all there’s not enough of that stuff in one apple’s worth of seeds to hurt you, and third of all you’d have to basically chew the seeds into powder, a thing that dogs famously do not do, to get even that tiny harmless amount.
It’s not safe for dogs to eat chocolate, grapes, or alliums. Everything else is kinda fine. (And tbh growing up my family dogs ate all of those things a few times and were fine – how dangerous it is depends on the concentration of the toxic thing, the size of the dog, etc.)
Just be yourself also is good advice. Not that it will always be successful in advancing the relationship. But it will be less stressful for you and prevent you from wasting years of your life with someone who only likes you for your fake personality.
If you have a horrible personality work on that so just being yourself doesn’t mean being an asshole. Even then though at least anyone getting into the relationship will know that ahead of time and not after the divorce.
Is it not? If a relationship forms out of you not being yourself then that’s not healthy. Although you would have to be not-yourself constantly and at that point doesn’t that not-yourself become yourself?
Is this a “be the change you want to see in the world” kinda thing?
Our concept of self is more fluid than most people realise, and we will often be very different in different social groups. We might not even notice this until those social groups collide. Each version of yourself is no more or less “you” than any other.
Thanks for the quality comment. It really is difficult to define since the sense of self is just a concept to begin with.
By being yourself, I would take that to mean being true to your intentions, interests, and general demeanor in the moment. All those can change with time.
Avoiding things like pretending to be interested in sports, pretending to hate comics, pretending to be a “player”, pretending to be overly macho, hiding politics, etc are all things that I have seen people do. If your interests change that’s normal but I wouldn’t recommend feigning things that are untrue for you in the moment.
I think aspiring for self improvement would still count as being true to yourself if you genuinely want to improve.
My mother once told us to get “a male realtor; the woman realtors don’t care as much because they’re just doing it as a hobby - the men are doing it as their full time job.”
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…
That is absolutely what follows. I am doing MUCH better, I’ve had 2.5 years sober in the last 3 years because I thought I was “cured” and started “moderating” last summer. The stop drinking subreddit was amazing insight and help. It’s on lemmy but the only posts are the daily checkin. I should start being more active on it to boost it.
“You just have to work through the pain.” I’ve injured myself multiple times in the past exercising by following this idiotic advice.
It’s one thing to push through discomfort, that’s how your body gets stronger. But If you’re in actual pain, stop and listen to the alarm bells your body is giving you.
Formal education was great for me, promise of working with cutting edge technologies. Vast amount of opportunities working in the IT sector. I was excited and happy for starting my second career choice.
As for the job I’ve landed, acceptable-better pay/benefits than most, the most backwards tech to work with and managing environment. I’d like to fantasize about leaving but with the work ethic in my area I can’t escape it without a drastic move.
I’m having the opposite experience, unfortunately. I loved working at {co-op company} where I had a choice of developer environment (OS, IDE, and the permissions to freely install whatever software was needed without asking IT) and used Golang for most tasks.
The formal education has been nothing but stress and anxiety, though. Especially exams.
Ah wow that’s a great experience for your co-op! You know maybe i’m rose tinting a little bit now that you’ve mentioned exams haha, but yeah I’d still say it’s been interesting working in the field for me to say the least.
Yep! I ended up doing my entire co-op with them, and it meshed really well with my interest in creating developer-focused tooling and automation.
Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to make the necessary changes and get approval from legal to open-source it, but I spent a good few months creating a tool for validating constraints for deployments on a Kubernetes cluster. It basically lets the operations team specify rules to check deployments for footguns that affect the cluster health, and then can be run by the dev-ops teams locally or as a Kubernetes operator (a daemon service running on the cluster) that will spam a Slack channel if a team deploys something super dangerous.
The neat part was that the constraint checking logic was extremely powerful, completely customizable, versioned, and used a declarative policy language instead of a scripting language. None of the rules were hard-coded into the binary, and teams could even write their own rules to help them avoid past deployment issues. It handled iterating over arbitrary-sized lists, and even could access values across different files in the deployment to check complex constraints like some value in one manifest didn’t exceed a value declared in some other manifest.
I’m not sure if a new tool has come along to fill the niche that mine did, but at the time, the others all had their own issues that failed to meet the needs I was trying to satisfy (e.g. hard-coded, used JavaScript, couldn’t handle loops, couldn’t check across file boundaries, etc.).
It’s probably one of the tools I’m most proud of, honestly. I just wish I wrote the code better. Did not have much experience with Go at the time, and I really could have done a better job structuring the packages to have fewer layers of nested dependencies.
That is truly so amazing! Honestly experiences like those are so worth it, but I feel for you not being able to make it open source then. If you haven’t already started on something else, I’m sure it’ll be some motivation for you down the road. Sorry for delayed response, crazy ass week for me lol.
In the 90’s before I was doing it professionally, I used to go on massive 10 - 15 hour binge programming sessions only stopping when I realized I hadn’t eaten in that entire time. It was some of the best fun I’ve ever had. But it happened rarely and organically, not 5 days a week on a predetermined schedule.
Totally relatable! As you already pointed out, it’s the “a day” part. I like listening to the radio but I talked to a former car radio tester who said that his car radio is never on and he enjoys the silence. It’s one thing to do stuff you like when you want to, maybe even binge, and another to have a schedule.
I started programming at school and when I studied computer science, another student asked me after the first semester what I’m going to program on vacation. I stared at them and said I have vacation. Now I programm full time and barely in my free time.
I like programming, and I program for a living, but there is nobody on earth who gets out of bed every day and is like “Aw yiss I’m gonna go code a bunch of salesforce integrations!”
I’ve been working long enough that at this point my work goal is like, I want a job that 95% of the time I do not actively dread. I don’t need to be excited about it, I just need it to be fine.
On the other hand I avoided going into the field until I hit 30 because I didn’t want to spend all day on a computer and then have it effect my willingness to use a PC at home.
Of course you don’t have to be a programmer to be stuck in front of a PC all day so I figured I might as well do something I’m good at. The main shift was that I now strongly prefer console/couch/tv gaming over PC/monitor/desk gaming.
That said I still find I come home unmotivated for hobby dev, if I’m going to work on my hobby projects I need to get out of bed 60-90 minutes earlier and do that while I’m fresh.
The main shift was that I now strongly prefer console/couch/tv gaming over PC/monitor/desk gaming.
This is the big one for me. My co-workers all wonder why I switched from pc to PlayStation, and I’m like, “dude, you just watched me troubleshoot 10 machines that failed our OS upgrade, and you think I want to come home and find that Windows update just broke my sound drivers again?”
Yeah because there’s absolutely nothing that needs to be done once I finally get my daughter down. No washing and sterilising, for prep for us or for her, general chores around the house which you can never do effectively one handed. And fuck me if I wanted to try and relax and have an actual evening after they’re down too.
“Sleeping like a baby” had also never seemed like such a juxtaposition!
Also, like, adult humans don’t do so good if they only get to sleep for an hour or two at a time. I don’t have kids but I have a puppy and my mental health improved 10x when he stopped waking up every night because he needed to pee. Just going from two 4-hour blocks of sleep to one 8-hour block.
Then he hit puppy adolescence and had a massive sleep regression and I was getting an hour or two of sleep at a time between SCREAMING PUPPY INTERLUDES and promptly lost my fucking mind. I gave up on crating him because I needed the sleep.
Simple suggestions like this are shit advice at the surface, but they often are the answer in the end. You have to dig and find that internal will to realize them.
Easier said than done, though, so maybe take some drugs to just stop worrying.
Sold it 5 years ago for somewhere in the 700s. So ultimately it turned out okay. But there was an extremely awkward period where I had to move out and would have sold if it wasn’t underwater. I wound up becoming a landlord for several years which I wouldn’t have chosen and felt pretty scummy but it did save me in the long run.
Gee. Thanks “doctor” for your advice. Obviously I’m going to listen to you after you watched a three minute YouTube video and not the doctor with six years of medical training and education!
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