Why Giving Advice Fails

An SSH perspective on advice

I guess, to some degree, all people have a deep-seated need to speak their minds and put their thoughts into words. Just think about how advice usually works. People ask for advice all the time, right? But they’re not actually asking for somebody’s opinion, or what that person would do in a similar situation. Far from it. What they’re really doing is putting their thoughts or their own experiences into words. That’s why advice never solves anything. Have you ever heard about advice leading to a resolution? Putting things into words like that only adds to the list of problems. It just makes things more complicated.

— Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night

Offering advice to others is seen by some as a duty, by others as a pleasure, and by a few souls rendered cynical by experience as pointless. Women seem to do it instinctively; they don’t understand that one of the reasons people actively avoid telling them things is because people know that doing so is going to result in a little monologue on what they should do or how they could do something differently whether they want one or not.

If you find yourself being surprised from time to time about things you didn’t know that you would have expected to have been told about, stop and think about how you tend to react to being told something. If your first response is to produce an alternative option even when no alternative options have been requested, congratulations, now you know why people aren’t telling you things.

It’s not that hard. If they’re not asking for help, don’t provide it. If they haven’t asked for another option, don’t suggest one. And if you absolutely cannot prevent yourself from sticking your nose into their business, at least ask them if they would like another option and respect their response if it is negative.

Gammas, of course, not only love to give advice, they tend to a) frame it as an absolute imperative, b) insist that every alternative option is not only suboptimal, but complete garbage, and c) take great offense when their Very Important Advice is not immediately followed and accompanied by the sort of humble gratitude that is obviously merited. And they give this advice despite it being unwanted, despite it being unasked, and despite never having met the other individual or the advice-receiver being a figment of their imagination.

If you have ever offered an explanation “just in case anyone doesn’t know” the reference previously made by someone else or some details about it, congratulations, you are definitely a Gamma. It always astonishes me that people don’t grasp how irritating and even insulting this behavior is.

Just in case anyone reading this doesn’t know what a Gamma is, a Gamma is a type of man who regularly demonstrates a reliable pattern of behavior that is indicative of low status on the socio-sexual hierarchy.

See what I mean? Don’t do that. As with “because,” the words “just in case” should also serve as an emergency warning to end the sentence and stop talking. Stop explaining. Stop helping. Just stop it. If anyone wants to know, if anyone wants your help, they will ask for it.

Deltas, Bravos, and Alphas are also prone to giving unwanted advice. But they’re responding to situations where someone, usually a woman, is expressing frustration about something or complaining about a problem. So they’re under the impression that they are being asked for advice on how to solve the problem, which may or may not be the case.