Advice is Cheap
Exercises in wisdom seeking
Welcome to the fifth Study of Ad Hoc Lab. This essay examines the dynamics of advice seekers, givers, and takers. You can read more about the Lab here.
If suffering brings wisdom, I would wish to be less wise.” — William Butler Yeats
I. Paralysis
The first week I was in Paris, I was immobilized by the slew of online resources proclaiming the best restaurants, cafes, bars, museums, parks, chateaus, vintage shops, and fleas. Instead of leaving my apartment and exploring, I spent hours at my wobbly dining table, crafting perfect itineraries to squeeze the most out of the city while avoiding any “misses” or “tourist traps.”
The upside to following recommendations is that a person (or anonymous website…) whose taste I trust has scoped it out and affirmed its worth. Some of my favorite places I visited were from Substack (tina zhang recommended the vintage treasure trove Preclothed, and I had very strong espresso from I/O thanks to Olivia Weiss). But I was addicted to cross-referencing multiple guides, digging through pages of reviews, and watching videos of walking tours. The more I searched, the more unsatisfied I grew. It was depressing and ironic; I was inside of the city I was spending hours of research on, saving pins on Google Maps, squinting at bistro menus on my tiny screens.
Perhaps travel brought out the worst in me because I felt such immense pressure to fill my limited time with transformative, valuable, joyful experiences. I used other people’s evaluations as proxies for my own fulfillment. I tricked myself into thinking the thick, velvety, viral chocolate mousse, or the guided tour of Versailles, might change my life.
At the same time, I resent myself for being basic. In “The Case Against Travel”, Agnes Callard writes:
The peculiar rationality of tourists allows them to be moved both by a desire to do what they are supposed to do in a place and a desire to avoid precisely what they are supposed to do. This is how it came to pass that, on my first trip to Paris, I avoided both the “Mona Lisa” and the Louvre. I did not, however, avoid locomotion. I walked from one end of the city to the other, over and over again, in a straight line.
I also did a lot of walking. I walked until my feet ached and I was so dehydrated I needed to stop inside supermarkets and buy liters of water. I would sit in a park only to get up after fifteen minutes. I breezed through museum galleries. I was searching for something I could not name; I needed as many chances as possible to get it right. Time slipped. I was lucid, anxious, insatiable.
Ralph Waldo Emerson called travel a “Fool’s Paradise.” He admitted, “I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated.”
I kept repeating one question to myself: “Is this the feeling?”
I left each place before I could find out.
II. Fever
One of my worst digital habits is clicking a bunch of hyperlinks with the open in a new tab button. Once I’ve accumulated dozens, I go through the webpages one by one, closing each tab when I’m finished. I often do this when I don’t have the mental capacity to read something long and involved. It’s like scrolling, but on Safari. I’ll skim through essays, fiction, photos, interviews, catalogs. When I’m in this restless mood, my favorite thing to read is a GUIDE.
Example guides include:
Best “X” of 2026; replace X with movies, shows, outfits, albums, breakups, books, shoes, stories, etc.
All of the Holiday gift guides that materialize in November and December
“How to get off your phone” articles that you read on your phone
How to become an influencer and get rich on the internet in three months or less
Health-related guides, like “How I healed my gut” or “Five tips that transformed my sleep”
Rarely do I retain the information or implement any of the tips from these guides into my life. It’s more of a self-soothing exercise. I do not fault guide-writers for this, because 1) I believe most are well intentioned and want to impart genuine advice, 2) I respect them for knowing how to play the game of the internet 3) I write my own guides sometimes, and they’re fun to put together.
The problem with guides lies in their unearned pleasure. They feel so good to read. By the end of a post about how to improve your productivity and design your dream life, your brain has tricked you into believing you have accomplished all the items the author has laid out. The same neurological regions in the brain are stimulated by reading about an experience and actually living through it. It’s like how talking about your goals can trigger a premature feeling of completion, lowering your motivation to actually accomplish them.
I often emerge from my Safari rabbit hole feeling like I have just eaten a bag of gummy worms, and now have a swarm of Red 40 and sugar and gelatin swimming in my body, unsure of how to metabolize itself.
III. Advice
A few weeks ago, I was hypnotized by a Reel spewing career advice and was shocked to discover that the creator was three years younger than me.
I know that wisdom is not always linear — we all have knowledge to impart — but as a young person, it’s hard to not feel like a fraud. On my twenty-second birthday, I published a collection of life lessons. I stand by some of the things I wrote (embarrassment is a choice, there is no substitute for reading books) and disagree with others (At twenty-four, I don’t trust Reddit as much as I used to).
In college, I compiled an Ad Hoc Yearbook that included lessons my friends learned that year. A foolproof way to avoid cringing at the specific advice you once wrote (as I have) is to add layers of abstraction until you achieve something ageless, poetic, and broadly applicable. These were three of my favorites:
Isa: People will leave, the work will get done, and the trees will become green again. Feel all of the big and little things intensely but be picky with what you allow to consume you.
Rachel: Cynicism is sabotage! There is more love, community, and unexpected wonder in the world than we’re conditioned to expect, but we have to trust that it exists.
Paola: Man plans, and God laughs. Alternatively, God plans, and man laughs. We must have all taken our funny pills… how lucky that we laughed at all.
They are not tactical, nor do they make any sweeping promises. Instead, they are expansive and hopeful. I think the best advice is not really advice; it is an invitation to see the world with more generous eyes.
It’s a valuable practice to stop and look back on the years you’ve lived, even if that number is only thirteen or eighteen or twenty-two. Every time I go through a major transition, I listen to Taylor Swift’s “Fifteen.” Her prescience as a high school freshman always makes me cry.
IV. Music
“Fifteen” still feels so closely connected to Swift’s experience of adolescence, like she broke up with her football player boyfriend and sat down with the guitar to metabolize the pain. Its details are hyper-specific (“you sit in class next to a redhead named Abigail”) but its themes are much broader: uncertainty, belief, hope, disillusionment.
When I was actually fifteen, I didn’t relate to the song at all. I was at a school I’d been attending my entire life, I’d tasted very little romance, and New York City was far from Swift’s quintessential suburbia. But when I got older and had actually lived through the experiences she touches on —being new in a place where everyone seems to know each other, giving and receiving professions of love without substance, wanting desperately to be understood when I barely understood myself — the song opened itself up to me.
Your reactions to your current state are inherently raw and charged with feeling. But it might take a few years for those reflections to marinate, to ultimately become meaningful. When I read journal entries from the past ten years, the dots only connect in hindsight. I’m weary of guides and advice because they aim to map out the future, when it might make more sense to draw lines through the past.
V. Truth
My friend’s dad told me there are things he doesn’t want to know about his daughter (like how much she drinks, or that she hasn’t selected a lucrative career path), because he’s old, and by this point, knows how the world works. Young people can take on more risk, and more stress, he says, because they are looking out into the great unknown.
It makes sense that successful founders are often college dropouts, who underestimate risk and overestimate their capacity for success. These two beliefs, combined with talent and grit and luck, catapult startups into unicorns. Then they sell their companies, become angel investors and board members and philanthropists, and tell news outlets: “If I could start over, knowing how difficult it was, I wouldn’t do it again.”
In these cases, knowledge harbors fear, regret, and disappointment. But I’ll bet when they received that same advice, they refused to listen.
Every time I am in a serious conundrum, on the precipice of a life-altering decision, I consult friends, family, reddit pages, Zodiac charts, Wikipedia, advice columns, self-help podcasts, the list goes on ad nauseum…
…and every time, I end up abiding by the instinct that has been sitting in the pit of my stomach, waiting for the noise to clear.
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really enjoyed this. i’ve found myself moving further and further away from “save this” content as and trying to just walk-in to places more and more. great piece!
It's like seeing inside my own brain.