It has recently become apparent to me how much time I spend being told by complete strangers how to conduct almost every aspect of my life. Several times a day I will pick up my phone and fire up Instagram, and some confident randomer will almost immediately appear and start telling me how to arrange my finances, or how to dress, or how to perform tricep dips so as to isolate the correct muscle groups, or how to parent my children in such a way as I don’t ruin their lives, or how to be happier in my romantic relationships, or how to achieve caloric deficit, or how to avoid glucose spikes, or how to get scratches out of the paintwork of my car using coconut oil and vinegar.
I know that on some level I enjoy this stuff; if I didn’t the mysterious algorithmic powers-that-be wouldn’t keep sending it my way and I wouldn’t keep watching it. There is, surely, some part of me – intellectually supine, voraciously gullible –– that desires nothing more than to open an app on my phone and have a succession of gleamingly self-possessed people (typically but not exclusively American) tell me how to do a bunch of different things.
To be clear, I don’t think this stuff is having much if any effect on how I conduct my affairs. My interest in the infinitely unfurling spectacle of online advice is, I think, more aesthetic than practical in nature.
I can also, if I’m feeling particularly shameless, just about manage to convince myself that my interest in it is somehow a sociological one, that in looking at it I’m in fact immersing myself in the detritus of technocapitalism in order to better understand it. “The poet must not avert his eyes,” as the film-maker Werner Herzog once memorably said in justification of his own unlikely devotion to reality TV.
Instagram’s algorithms, having clearly divined my weakness for dispensers of life advice, have started offering me an increasingly extreme succession of social media consiglieres. This morning, for instance, I watched and thoroughly enjoyed a video in which an entrepreneur-influencer explained to me that “as a man” I should be aiming to make €500 per day, every day, and that I would achieve this by owning not just my own house but also four additional houses that would bring in rental income. This at least was my understanding of the video; I may have missed some nuance but in any case the guy was pretty light on practicalities.
I wasn’t watching it for practical purposes, of course, any more than I watched for practical purposes the video I encountered straight after, in which a man who described himself as an “elite sales warrior” explained why, at the sales company he owned and ran, he never hired anyone to work for him who didn’t have six-pack abs. (I think it had something to do with self-respect and dedication.)
I wonder at times whether I’m actually watching this stuff in the way that it was intended. Perhaps it wasn’t intended to be consumed as advice so much as advice-themed entertainment. It is to self-help, in other words, as pro wrestling is to actual sport: a crude form of drama in which the protagonist is a guy who knows a lot about life, and the story is him telling you about it.
There is no getting around it, though: we are up to our bleary eyes in advice. Surely no generation in human history has been so relentlessly and variously counselled. So much of life these days – and by life I mean, of course, looking at your phone – is like a postmodernist production of Hamlet, where it’s just Polonius delivering a succession of increasingly inane maxims to a punch-drunk Laertes. (If Polonius were still with us he would have a terrible and hugely successful podcast called To Thine Own Self Be True, and would probably also own at least four rental properties.)
Why this insane superabundance of instruction? Why do we seem to be drowning in a rising tide of Poloniuses?
I think part of it is the entertainment value I mentioned above. I can’t be the only person who derives enjoyment from being told what to do by a brashly overconfident American, and the occasional brashly overconfident non-American.
There is also, of course, the basic issue of technology: the advent of the smartphone and social media have enabled the rapid proliferation and wide dissemination of advice. Some of this, I should say, is even useful. As a parent of young children naturally a lot of the advice content that gets pushed my way has to do with parenting, and I will admit to having occasionally taken some of this on board. I’m not a total purist when it comes to this stuff, in other words: I will sometimes treat it as more than mere entertainment.
But I think there is an irony at the centre of the phenomenon that might – as ironies often do, ironically – go some way toward explaining the whole thing. It feels almost too banal to point out, but is nonetheless true, that we all now spend a completely insane amount of time staring at our phones, most of which time is devoted to the consumption of completely meaningless content.
Many of us feel, in one way or another, that this is causing some kind of brain-rot to set in at the individual level, and that this is intimately connected with a rot at the wider civilisational level. What better way to distract from and salve this anxiety than to imagine that this very activity – this endless scrolling through and passive consumption of content – might itself be a vector of self-improvement.
If you’re wondering what we should do about it you’re looking in the wrong place. Maybe the elite sales warrior guy might have some ideas.
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