The Importance of Ignoring Good Advice

People give me advice with the best of intentions. They want to save me time, money, or mental anguish (and in the process likely save themselves the same). Some percentage of the advice is deserving of being called 'good', in the sense that if I followed it, I really would save myself some amount of trouble.

At first glance, you can be forgiven for thinking that I aim to pan through the silt of recommendations and guidance bestowed upon me, allowing any unworthy tidbits of input to fall back into the river from whence they came, leaving me with only the solid gold nuggets of good, meaningful, actionable advice. But I absolutely do not do this, and what's more, I don't think it's a good idea to do this.

I fully accept that I am unnecessarily stubborn and that is one of my worst qualities. I also haven't spent a great deal of time meditating on this topic, so, err, I might be totally wrong. But hear me out.

Following good advice has one huge drawback. It removes the opportunity for failure, and the further opportunity for learning from said failure. It is like trying to solve a difficult puzzle or riddle - if somebody simply tells you the answer, not only are you robbed of the satisfaction of arriving at the correct conclusion of your own volition, but posed with a similar but subtly different problem, you would be unable to answer that question without further external help.

I apply this a lot in programming - I have a problem, and a more experienced developer offers me some advice on how I might go about structuring a solution. Sometimes, especially if I am busy, I will just do what they say, and arrive at some reasonably satisfactory changes that are committed and pushed and forgotten about. If I have some more time on my hands though, I will usually try the way I had originally envisaged - even though my own idea is borne out of naïveté and may well turn out to be inelegant and inefficient. But, whenever one of these hacks turns out to actually fix the initial bug, even if the code is ugly, I have invariably gained some insight into the nature of the language or into programming itself.

The same is also true on a larger scale. Both my greatest successes and the failures which have shaped me (also successes of a kind) have come as a result of ignoring good advice.

Yesterday, I wrote about resisting counting my calories, reluctant to follow conventional wisdom until I had exhausted all other possible avenues, and semi-independently came to the understanding that tracking my food intake was the best solution to the problem. Today, I think I have come to the same conclusion about happiness.

Happiness is not found in a therapist's office, nor in isolated soul searching, nor in extravagant journies afar to 'find oneself', nor in meditating to find enlightenment or trying to make money, get jacked or have sex. Happiness (I think) comes from connecting to the people around you, in a genuine and raw way. It comes from telling people how I feel, and trying to understand how others feel. Even if I can say that I have many friends and people who mean a lot to me... I am not really close to them, at least not in a way I'd like to be. I hide so much of myself, out of deep shame or fear of rejection. It's taken me a long time to finally reach the conclusion, but I now think a large part of my unhappiness is due to how incredibly lonely I feel. It's crippling and unbearably painful. I have thought for a while that loneliness was somewhat self-perpetuating - you cannot force friendship or attraction, and being lonely makes people want to interact with me less. I thought that perhaps if I had better self esteem, then I wouldn't feel/act so lonely, and relationships (platonic or otherwise) would come more easily to me. But now, I don't really think that at all - actually I kinda think the opposite. I hope that if I tell the people around me how I actually feel, even if that feeling is debilitating loneliness, shame, anxiety and suicidality, then I will feel connected and closer to them, and our relationship will flourish because of it. In turn, I hope that a newfound sense of closeness to those around me will allow me to grow as a person and hopefully dig myself out of the ever-deepening hole of depression that I currently inhabit.

I'll report back with whether I'm actually right about this.