A General Disclaimer
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Advice-givers, gurus, and essayists everywhere would be a lot better off if they started and ended all of their advice with something like the following. Actually, a lot of them would be better off if they just read something like this and realized it applied to them.
8 Rules For Taking Advice From Me
1: Don’t. Think for yourself. If my advice or ideas help point you in the right direction or change the way you think about something, that is great. But don’t blindly follow what I say. You are not a herd animal.
2: Advice online is tragically overvalued and is less useful than you think (if you are the kind of person who reads a lot of advice online). Reading advice, and fantasizing about what you could do, is very often an addiction in and of itself. So if I write anything that leaves you dreaming about the future or implies that you could do something great, then you should just do it (and stop reading advice about it).
3: You don’t know me. I bet there’s some weird shit I’ve done that you would be a little freaked out by, and there’s some weird shit you’ve done I’d be a little freaked out by. I probably hold at least one opinion you find completely abhorrent (and vice versa). I’m saying this just so you remember, as you read all of this, that you might not even like me if you met me. Refer again to rule #1.
4: This is my own perspective. I, like everyone else, am heavily biased. I try my best to be self-aware but I think it’s impossible to be completely self-aware. My life and opinions formed from it are not based on a representative sample of the human experience (nobody can truly claim that).
5: This is not financial advice, legal advice, tax advice, or official advice in any capacity.
6: Ten people can read the same thing and all have unique reactions to it. This is yet another reason why advice online should always be taken with a grain of salt. There’s a good chance you aren’t even having the reaction I thought you would have. You might even be having a reaction I did not realize was possible.
7: Anyone with access to the internet can publish their thoughts online on a pretentious minimalist website. It’s just that most people don’t, which leads to a kind of fallacy where it can seem like the words I publish here are inherently more special than some random comment your Uber driver made yesterday, or the weird plotline of last night’s dream. They are not (necessarily).
8: If you find yourself disagreeing or, you know, really frothing at the mouth with anything I say or write, remember that you should think for yourself. You do not have to agree. You might not even be interpreting it the way I meant it to be interpreted. Again, you don’t know me, and I don’t know you. Don’t let me ruin your day. And now that I’ve said it, if you read something here that ruins your day — that is on you.
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