The Problem With Advice

A missive to my younger self

Photo by Gwendal Cottin on Unsplash

I have a new piece out in Queer Majority about vampires, the crisis of meaning, and the latest season of What We Do in the Shadows: “What We All Do in the Shadows.”

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I turned 36 this past summer. I know I don’t look it, although just the other week I discovered my first gray whisker. This birthday reminded me of one of my ice hockey pals, Jon, who I’ve played with for over a decade. He’s always been fond of joking that 36 is the age at which you are officially old, because it’s the first age at which you can date someone half your age. Though I have no intention of dating any 18-year-olds, the thought got a chuckle out of me. It made me think about my own adolescent self. How different a person I was. How different my interests, tastes, perceptions, biases, and sensibilities were. How many “becoming your father” things I swore I would never do and have since done. How much I have learned, and yet how much more aware I now am of my ignorance. What would I say to teenage Jamie if I had the chance? What adult wisdom would the younger me most benefit from?

There are many specific bits of hindsight I could share. Don’t go to college. Get into reading earlier. Be better at staying in touch with friends. But if I could only impart a single piece of advice, it would be that nothing in life is ever as hard as it’s made out to be. To be sure, plenty of things in life will be difficult, grueling, painful, uncomfortable, and scary — but it’s never as bad as you think it will be. And each new tribulation you put in the rear-view mirror will have you thinking some version of “That wasn’t so bad. I worked myself up for nothing.” The anxiety is always worse than the deed.

The most stressful period of my life was the second half of eighth grade — January through May of 2000. I experienced a state of intense and uninterrupted anxiety for four straight months. I barely slept or ate. I found no enjoyment in friends, games, or hobbies. Four months of round-the-clock stomach-churning panic.

I had been misled from nearly every direction — parents, educators, and peers — into believing that success in life depended on a narrow and very specific chain of events that had to happen. I had to have a high-paying job. In order to do that, I had to attend an elite university. In order to be accepted into an elite university, I had to attend a prestigious prep school where I also aced my grades and SATs. In order to get into a fancy prep school, I had to have a very high grade point average in middle school. If any link in this causal chain was disrupted, my 13-year-old brain was led to believe, my life was functionally over. My only chance of happiness and fulfillment would be lost, and I’d live out my days from that point on as a failure, running out the clock on a life wasted, sleepwalking toward the grave in quiet, impotent misery. I believed this absolutely.

I was halfway through eighth grade, and my middle school GPA was somewhere in the B range. My future hung by a thread, and I had four months to make my last stand, my final desperate attempt to pull myself back from the brink of the abyss. If I got damn near perfect scores across the board, it would pull my cumulative grades above whatever threshold my school counselor insisted should be sufficient, as these prep schools weigh your final year of middle school more heavily.

So, with a monomaniacal single-mindedness I had never before (or since) shown, I spent every waking second laser-focused on achieving academic perfection. In pursuit of what I imagined to be the good life, I consumed myself in a maelstrom of misery for months. But it worked. My report card came back so sterling you had to wear sunglasses to read it, my GPA was lifted, my interview and entrance essay went well (it was a more involved process than when I applied to college), and I squeaked into this school for prodigies off of the waiting list in mid-summer.

It turned out to be a terrible mistake. I simply didn’t belong at this school. Buried under a crushing load of coursework, friendless, and beneath the contempt of the old-money student body who were my clear social and intellectual superiors (and knew it), ninth grade was a miserable year. These 14-year-olds were listening to Bob Dylan, writing poetry, playing ultimate frisbee, wearing lots of corduroy, and reading at a grad school level. I was watching Dragon Ball Z, battling Pokémon, and playing ice hockey (independent of the school, which had no sports program). These were kids who, to an individual, would have been ruthlessly bullied in public school, but here, they were the norm. Here, I was the loser, not for being a nerd, or socially awkward, but for being normal. It wasn’t the end of the world. I got decent grades and made the best of a shitty atmosphere. But one year of Harvard Mean Girls was more than enough for me. I transferred to another school and had a wonderful experience.

I never went through another ordeal quite like that, not to the same extent, but it became a recurring pattern. Every milestone, rite of passage, and major life event was consistently represented to me as being more daunting than it later turned out to be. I suspect some of you are thinking “Wait until you have kids.” Maybe that’s the lone exception, but the jury is out on that one. The point isn’t that life has been a breeze, but that at every turn, people tend to play up life’s difficulty level. More than that, people assign this artificial gravity to everything, conveying a sense of exaggerated permanence to every choice or outcome. “X won’t just be incredibly hard, if you mess it up, it’ll follow you forever.”

It starts in early childhood, first with older siblings, the older siblings of friends, or upperclassmen who get off on trying to scare the kids with over-the-top dire warnings about things in store for them. It’s reinforced by every authority figure and unsolicited advice-peddler you encounter through life, well into adulthood. To this day, I encounter dogshit “advice” that amounts to little more than a frat boy’s gleeful attempt to frighten the freshmen.

I was told that high school would be incredibly difficult and that everything in my life hinged on getting into the right school. I was told similar lies about college. Ditto girls, driving, standardized tests, senior thesis projects, adult life, entering the workforce, home ownership, pursuing a career in writing, aging, and on and on. Every intimidating picture that has ever been painted for me, either by others or by my own mind, about what to expect in the next chapter of life, has turned out to be trumped-up scaremongering bullshit. 

Over the years, I’ve come to increasingly discount these warnings to the point that I now pay them no heed at all. While they may come packaged in the trappings of advice, I have come to realize that their purpose, whether consciously acknowledged or not, serves only the giver’s interests, not yours. Whether it’s to self-aggrandize themselves (“Look at this impressive stuff I’ve done, this harrowing experience I’ve endured.”); or to derive a perverse pleasure and sense of power from frightening another person; or to dissuade their would-be competition from entering the arena with them;¹ people will always try to sell you short for their own gain under the guise of helping you. In a sick world afflicted by a zero-sum mindset, people operate under the imbecilic belief that their worth can only be elevated by suppressing yours.

If there is one thing I would tell my younger self, one thing the adolescent me most needed to hear, it’s this: Nothing is permanent, almost every mistake can be fixed, and nothing is as hard as people will tell you it is. Don’t let their own smallness and insecurity diminish you. It’s not that you should believe more in yourself per se, but rather that you should believe less in what you hear. Many folks aren’t even fully aware of what they’re doing, so deep is the rot in the collective psyche, but every time you feel yourself daunted after hearing some “advice”, take it with a grain of salt. That’s what I wish someone would have told me. It’s what I’m telling you now. In the immortal words of George Carlin, “Life is not that complicated. You get up, you go to work, you eat three meals, you take one good shit, and you go back to bed. What's the fucking mystery?”

See also: “What Does It Mean to Grow Up?”

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1. 99.9 percent of writers who give career “advice” to aspiring writers.