Men and Women, Meta-Advice, Stories and Songs
Three Point Thursday
Happy Three Point Thursday!
This week’s edition features some social commentary, advice about advice, and a wise quote from a wise man.
The dumbest takes of all time.
Few people are as ridiculous and distrubing to me than women who are hateful of men in general, and men who are hateful of women in general. Imagine the lunatic, radical feminist “queen,” who doesn’t need a man because they’re all trash; or the jobless, socially inept, resentful bum who is a raging misogynist. These people are the worst. I pity them in the sense that there is no way, deep down, that they are not miserable. It’s almost impossible to comprehend how lost you must be to denounce the opposite sex as a whole. You know, considering how profound a source of meaning and happiness a loving relationship is, and how you wouldn’t even exist had a male and female not joined in union.
The advice that matters most is about advice itself.
Most of what I share online is notes to self. When I write, “be a bookworm and a gym rat; be a jacked nerd,” as I’ve done only a few billion times, I’m talking to myself. I want you to be aware of this reality. Because while there are timeless principles and activities that are reliably a net-positive, taking specific advice—especially from people on the internet you don’t know—can lead to so much confusion and even danger. Now, I’ve applied and benefited from a significant amount of advice from both friends and family, as well as books and people on the internet. But even still, I’ve come to the conclusion that the most important advice is about advice itself, and its potential harms. Meta-advice, if you like. It is about realizing that advice is often problematic because you have a unique situation. And everyone else has a different set of specific problems they are trying to solve. Context, friends, context. What works for someone else might not work for you, and what didn’t work for someone else might work for you. “If you survey enough people, all of the advice will cancel to zero,” said philosopher Naval Ravikant. “You have to have your own point of view…you have to reject most advice.” By rejecting most advice, you’ll avoid doing things that don’t make sense for you to be doing, saving you more of your most precious resource: time.
Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020.
“Perhaps we, who are language animals, possess a song and story instinct; we need and move toward stories and songs not because we are taught to do so but because it is in our nature to need them.”