“I Don’t Know Who Needs to Hear This”: The Advice Dispensation Industrial Complex and Why I Hate it
Lol, I hope this isn’t one of them because here I go.
Every time I log onto instagram, the algorithm is suggesting reels for me to view. I get a variety of suggestions ranging from pottery process videos to cute farm animals, giving me the surreal experience of moving seamlessly from frolicing baby goats to a spinning pottery wheel, to a sped up tour of someone’s apartment halfway around the world. But there’s one genre that dominates: people pointing at words and giving me advice. This advice is wildly specific considering it’s directed to literally anyone scrolling instagram: what I should not wear, investment mistakes I’m making, how I should talk to my white relatives about race, what I should do to improve my mental health, whether or not I should apologize, mistakes I’m making in my relationships, mistakes I’m making in my workout, how I will know if I have ADHD, how I will know if I have secure attachment style, how I will know if I’m a highly sensitive person, how I can heal my childhood trauma, how I should respond to my feelings, how others should respond to my feelings, how I should respond to my toddler’s tantrum, how I should style low rise denim, how I, a millennial, should part my hair. Gone are the days when advice was something a person would seek out from a trusted friend, family member, or hired expert, sitting down to speak to someone and spelling out the specifics of what they want advice about and why. No, now advice is universal, given to everyone, by everyone, about everything, all the time. All advice applies to everyone, and anyone with a smartphone is qualified to give it. Louder for the people in the back! Am I right?
No, imagined internet interlocutor, you’re not right. And I’m here to explain why. It’s hard to pinpoint why this trend, which I’m calling the advice dispensation industrial complex (yes, mostly in jest), irks me so much, but it does. irk me. so. much. I’m writing this post in part to try to process why.
Looks like the key is not putting the cardigan all the way on.
The end of expertise
We, on the left, love to bemoan the rise of fake news and disregard for expertise, and we’re right to do so, but embracing made up (or decontextualized) information from non-experts isn’t just a right-wing, anti-vax, Trumper thing. It’s a social media thing. Somehow viral tik-tok videos, instagram reels, and youtube stars have convinced us that we are all experts, able to dole out advice to anyone and everyone about anything we feel like giving advice on. Or maybe they haven’t convinced you, but I bet that like me, you are still bombarded with this genre of advice dispensing videos, day in and day out. And it’s hard not to absorb the idea that you too should be taking and giving advice on the internet.
Forget the nuances and culture of a specific workplace, this applies to anyone who scrolls by!
This is arguably pretty harmless when it comes to fashion, make-up, and home decor (though I’m willing to bet that a lot of these DIY home projects should really be done by professionals). While I’m annoyed to discover a whole genre of videos that show side-by-side images of someone wearing two outfits with a big red X over one and a green check mark over the other, accompanied by voice-over advice about how millennials need to give up certain fashion trends that make them look older, I don’t think it’s especially harmful. I’m not willing to be so generous towards people doling out physical and mental health advice as if it’s a new cut of jeans that anyone can try on and see if they think it’s flattering. A huge part of the problem here is that people are desperate enough for mental and physical health advice that they’re willing to just accept whatever floating words a random stranger on the internet points to. Signs I’m depressed? Sure, that sounds right. Things I should do to alleviate my chronic pain? Okay, I’ll try it. But who is making these lists or giving this advice? Sometimes I click on an account when I see a video explaining attachment style or symptoms of ADHD or gut health, and occasionally it’s from a professional in the field, but often it’s just from someone who seems to have gotten their info from an internet video as well, creating a bizarre mimetic multiplication of questionable advice dispensed by laypeople. Our willingness to accept and dole out such advice with so little consideration is probably a symptom of a larger problem, not the problem in and of itself. It might be tied to an economy and healthcare system where many Americans fear that seeking professional help will result in medical bills they can’t afford, a doctor who ignores or belittles their concerns, or an insurance show-down that they don’t have time, money, or energy to deal with. A recent poll found that only 12% of Americans felt that US healthcare was handled well. In a country where people have to choose between basic medical upkeep and becoming homeless, is it any wonder we resort to random strangers on the internet to give us medical and life advice?
Hey, at least this guy is a doctor (or claims to be)! But how does he know about my personal protein needs?
This isn’t to say that none of these advice-givers are experts or that all the advice being given is bad or harmful. I know that there are plenty of doctors and psychologists and personal trainers who are making tik-toks and instagram slides that are informed by their practice and expertise. And I know that plenty of the content consumers who follow them might genuinely feel that they belong to a community and have some established trust in the person behind the account. And maybe that’s fine, though I’d argue that a doctor or psychologist is still different from your doctor or psychologist. And this is the source of my other issue with this genre of internet content: the assumed universality of it.
All generality and no nuance
Sure, one could argue that social media is a place where you put something out there and the audience (more likely the algorithm) can decide if something is for them or not. But this isn’t really how it works. The algorithm promotes things based on superficial AI categorizations and what someone already interacts with. This is why I get parenting videos even though I’m not a parent– the videos I watch have some similarities or overlap with videos that parents watch. This particular example might seem pretty harmless; I can just scroll past the parenting videos. But what about all the serious mental and physical health advice that’s being doled out as if medical or mental health advice is one-size-fits-all? It’s not just the lack of expertise that’s the issue, it’s the generality. While it’s possible that what worked for one person will work for another, that doesn’t make something a rule that someone should be espousing to everyone. And while it’s possible that someone can accurately diagnose herself based on a bullet point list of symptoms rather than a meeting with a professional, there’s growing concern about teens misdiagnosing themselves with mental health issues, and actual therapists say they’re struggling to persuade their patients to believe the expertise of a therapist over the hundreds of tik tok videos they’re consuming. In this NY Times article, Christina Caron explains the danger of this tik tok sub-genre when it comes to mental health diagnoses:
“The format — looping videos that are often less than one minute long — doesn’t leave much room for nuance. Viewers in search of mental health information may find little more than a bullet list of symptoms.
But part of what makes diagnosis so complicated is that the same disorder can express itself in a child, adolescent and adult very differently — in other words, the same list of symptoms does not apply to every age group.”
That it “doesn’t leave much room for nuance” is precisely my issue with the advice/diagnosis video genre. Even if the maker has expertise in the field, they’re still promoting a gross oversimplification, and as Caron says, the information just doesn’t apply to everyone.
I don’t know, but I bet you can tell me!
I have a friend who’s a midwife and she said there’s a new wave of patients who come in with very specific birthing lingo and they show up asking for things as if they’re choosing a birthing strategy from a mail order catalog. The issue is that much of what they’re asking for, which they have invariably learned from tik tok videos, is complex, the sort of thing she might have spent a year of her PhD researching and learning about the nuances of. Of course she wants to give her patients what they want and feel comfortable with, but sometimes their knowledge is so limited that they don’t know that they’re asking for two contradictory things, or using a term completely wrong or out of context or asking for something that’s just a standard part of the labor process that they would have experienced anyway. But a tik toker has so convincingly pointed at the air words to explain in one minute why they need to ask their doctor for X type of birth, that they’re convinced that a stranger on the internet, giving generalized advice, has somehow pinpointed the exact thing that they need. I’m not trying to criticize the democratization of information that has undoubtedly come with the rise of the internet, but rather to point out a certain loss of nuance and specificity that has come with that. My friend’s patient may have been watching tik tok videos that were made by another doctor or midwife, but the maker of the video was not her doctor or midwife. What we lose when we universalize medical or mental health advice is the very important step of being treated like an individual with a story, a medical history, and a value system unique to us. Once again, there’s a clear red arrow pointing to all the problems with our healthcare system which make many of us feel that we have no choice but to use tik tok to solicit advice rather than reading a book, going to a doctor, or talking to a trusted friend about our experiences. And perhaps at the root of that is the fact that our healthcare system also fails to acknowledge that we are individuals with stories, medical histories, and value systems unique to us. Nonetheless I’m still not convinced that viral tik tok videos are the solution to the problem.
I’m not trying to say that nothing good has come out of people sharing knowledge on the internet or creating communities around specific identity points, health issues, parenting struggles, neurological differences, and the like. I know that these are, in fact, some of the more positive things that have come out of social media. I suppose what I’m suspicious of is the growing popularity of dispensing advice in a black and white “why you should____” format and the algorithm clearly favoring that format over other, less reductive ones. We seem to crave the simplicity of being told what to do and telling others what to do. I have found myself, after seeing this format so much, feeling the urge to re-create it myself. Do I make a video about why, like me, you should not buy a house right now? About how to read more books or go for more walks or turn your hobby into a career? Yes, I value and have some experience doing these things and making these choices, but why would I feel compelled to share them in a way that universalizes my experience and distills it into a how-to guide rather than a simple reflection on why I do what I do and how I feel about it? This would arguably be a more relational and community minded approach than simply telling people how to be like me.
You would know, internet stranger!
I suppose this is part of why I wanted a blog, to push back against the short form everything-is-advice genre of writing that is sweeping the internet. The tik tok/reel cycle means that the aim is always virality, not deep understanding, connection, or meaningful content. The wider the net is cast, the more views one is likely to get, so perhaps this is at the heart of the insipid generality of this advice. It has to be for everyone. But nothing is really for everyone. At any rate, I’m pretty sure it’s not for me.
References
“Majority of Americans Unhappy with Health Care System” PBS New Hour
“Young People on TikTok are Self-Diagnosing” New York Times
