Why I don’t want unsolicited advice on social media posts
A few friends have occasionally questioned my adding “No advice, please” to my posts, so I’ve been meaning for a long time to give some more details and clarity around that. But it’s a sensitive topic, and it’s taken me a while to put together a post that (I hope) makes clear where I’m coming from without being too critical of y’all who like to give advice. I don’t want to be super critical, because I very much appreciate the desire to be helpful. But I do want to clarify my boundaries.
Those of you who’ve given me unsolicited advice in the past, rest assured that I don’t think you’re evil or anything, and I’m not mad at you; I’m just trying to explain here why I don’t want advice. If reading about that is likely to upset you, then you may want to skip this post.
I also want to acknowledge that the urge to give unsolicited advice can feel very strong. (I have been known to succumb to it myself on occasion.) I very much appreciate the restraint that y’all exercise these days when I ask for no advice.
I’ll present this post in a short version, a medium-length version, and a longer version, all listed below.
Oh, and please don’t give me advice about the topics in this post.
The short version
For most of my posts, I’m not posting to get advice; I’m posting to get sympathy, or to describe something interesting, or to reach out and make a connection with people.
Also, the unsolicited advice that I get on social media usually doesn’t help me, and in most cases it upsets me, especially when it’s catastrophizing. (I don’t entirely know why it upsets me so much, but it does.)
The medium-length version
When I ask commenters to refrain from giving me advice, it’s usually for some or all of the following reasons. (The long version, below, goes into more detail about each of these reasons.) Most of these reasons apply to most situations where I get advice, but reasons 5 and 6 are specific to certain kinds of situations.
- My goals: My goal in posting isn’t to get advice.
- Catastrophizing: The advice that I get tends to be catastrophizing.
- Not relevant: Even when it’s not catastrophizing, the advice I tend to get usually isn’t relevant to my situation; it’s usually based on incorrect assumptions and incomplete information.
- Redundant: If the advice is relevant to my situation, it’s usually something I’ve already thought of.
- Changing the past: In situations when I’m describing something that has gone badly, the advice that commenters sometimes give me would require me to have a time machine.
- Exhausting: In situations when I’m describing an accomplishment, it’s often exhausting to me to be told that there are a bunch of things that I should do beyond whatever it is I’ve already done.
- Stressful: All of these kinds of advice generally cause me a lot of stress.
The long version
The below list gives more detail about each of the points in the medium-length version.
My goals:
The biggest issue is that my goal in posting on social media is almost never to get advice. Usually, in the kinds of situations where commenters want to give me advice, my goal in posting was just to complain about something, or to get sympathy, or to describe an interesting thing that happened in my life, or to share an achievement.
My underlying goal in almost all such cases is to make a connection—to share something about my life with friends. And to me, being given advice doesn’t feel like connection; in fact, it feels like the opposite of connection. It makes me feel like the person who’s giving me advice is so wrapped up in themselves that they’re not thinking about me, about who I am and what I want and how I do things.
So when I post something, my post isn’t a request to solve a problem for me. (Unless I explicitly ask for advice or help.) By the time I post, if the situation includes any problems that still need to be solved, I’m usually well on the way to solving them. (I’m an internal processor, not an external processor, and I’m generally uncomfortable asking for help with things. I generally like to do as much research and problem-solving as I can before I talk publicly about issues I’m experiencing.)
Catastrophizing:
Attempts to advise me are often catastrophizing. They make it sound like the problem is far far worse than I know it to be. They tell me that I ought to be panicking, or that if I don’t take immediate action I will probably experience extremely severe consequences, possibly including death. (Part of what originally led me to start explicitly requesting no advice was being told repeatedly that I would die if I didn’t do something in particular, in response to two different not-at-all-dangerous situations that I had posted about.)
In theory, dire warnings could be useful; I certainly understand that my friends want to keep me safe! But I have a diagnosed anxiety disorder. My inner catastrophizer frequently works hard to tell me (incorrectly) that various situations are disastrously bad. It doesn’t need any help.
Partly because of my anxiety, I am generally a quite cautious and risk-averse person. I generally carefully weigh the risks that I perceive before taking action. So chances are pretty good that any catastrophic risks that commenters come up with are either things that have no bearing on my situation, or things I’ve already considered.
Which brings me to the next two points.
Not relevant:
In a given post about an experience of mine, I never include all of the details/parameters of the issue I’m experiencing, so attempts to diagnose my situation are extremely unlikely to succeed. I know far more about the situation than commenters do. The assumptions that commenters make when giving advice are often quite different from the reality of the situation; unfortunately, that means it’s rare that the advice usefully addresses the situation at hand.
…Which could theoretically be okay; in theory, the only problem with this kind of advice is that it wastes the commenter’s time. Except that receiving irrelevant advice makes me impatient and tense.
Redundant:
Chances are pretty good that if any of the advice is relevant to my situation, I’ve already thought of most of the things that that advice tells me to do. In some cases, I’ve thought of them and tried them; in some other cases, I've thought of them and decided not to try them. I have a lot of problem-solving resources at my disposal, and I rarely post about a problem without having already tried to solve it.
Here, too, arguably the problem is not so much the advice as my negative reaction to receiving it.
Changing the past:
In some posts, I describe something that has gone badly, sometimes because of something that I didn’t do as well as would have been ideal. In response to such posts, I sometimes receive advice telling me what I should have done instead.
But advice that starts out with a phrase like “You should have” tends to upset me. What I hear when I receive advice like that is that someone is telling me that I did whatever I did incorrectly, and that it’s not possible for me to fix the wrong thing that I did, and that they’re criticizing me for having done it wrong. That pushes a bunch of my buttons, even (maybe especially) when I agree that I did it wrong.
I don’t have a time machine. I can’t go back in time and do things differently. In general, telling me what I should have done isn’t helpful to me.
Exhausting:
In some posts, I write about something that I’ve accomplished. In those situations, I’ve often spent a lot of energy, and sometimes a lot of time, getting to this point. I’m excited! I’m triumphant! I’ve achieved something!
At that particular moment, being told all the other things that I have to do next, or all the other things that I could be doing, or all the other things that I will need to learn to get to the next level of skill, isn’t helpful to me; instead, it tires me out.
When people post this kind of response, I’m sure it feels to them like they’re joining in my excitement. Just think of all the further exciting things I’ll be able to do after I spend another fifty hours (or fifty years) learning to do them!
But to me, it blunts the happiness that I’m feeling over having reached a milestone.
Stressful:
What a lot of this comes down to is that being told that I’m wrong, that I’ve failed, and/or that I must panic stresses me out even when I know for certain that such comments are incorrect.
In particular, due to my anxiety, when people tell me that I’m in imminent danger of catastrophic consequences, it makes me really really tense, even when I know that they’re wrong.
But even in the non-catastrophizing case, being given advice that doesn’t apply to me (especially when it’s based on incomplete information or incorrect assumptions) makes me stressed. I’m not entirely sure why, but it does.
I think part of it is that in this kind of context, I tend to interpret advice as criticism, chiding, and initiating conflict, which I often don’t react well to in general. And if I’m posting about something that I’m already (at least a little bit) tense or unhappy about, a comment that comes across as criticism makes me feel attacked by someone who I had hoped would instead be sympathetic. (This is especially true when (as often happens) the advice is given in a tone that I read as scornful/exasperated. See also my 2019 blog post Exasperation isn’t necessarily the same thing as sympathy.)
There are a bunch of other factors, and I haven’t untangled all of them with my therapist yet. I think, for example, that advice in the form of criticism sometimes pushes my fear-of-rejection-by-peer-group buttons.
…Anyway, after all that verbiage, I think the most important part is item 1 above: the point of my posts is almost never to get advice. (Unless I explicitly request it.) That’s mostly just not what I use social media for.
It’ll be good if I can learn (through my ongoing therapy, for example) how to be less stressed by receiving advice. That’ll make my life better, and it’ll be easier on my friends who love to give advice. And once in a while, friends have given me really helpful advice, so it would be nice if I could be more often open to the possibility of that happening.
But for now, unsolicited advice upsets me way out of proportion. So that’s why I ask people not to give it.
What can you do instead?
…So, you may be asking, what can you do instead of giving me advice? Here are a few things that are less likely to stress me out:
- If I seem to be stressed or sad or regretful, you can express sympathy, either in words or by clicking an appropriate social media react icon.
- If I seem to be wryly amused, you can express amusement.
- If I seem to be excited/happy, you can express enthusiasm or congratulations.
- You can ignore the post entirely.
There are plenty of other options, too. Most responses that are sympathetic and/or kind work well for me.
(I started writing this post in 2020; it took me a long time to reach a version that I’m semi-comfortable posting.)
(I finished this post on July 7, 2024, but forgot to click the Publish button until July 20.)