As a kid and teenager, I used to vehemently hate clichés and "folk wisdom" delivered to me by family and friends. It took me until adulthood to finally accept them and understand them for what they are. And what they are is tried and true heuristics, that apply more often than not to situations in which they're invoked.

The problem with those is that they're just pointers, handles to a set of complex reasoning and personal experiences - so you're unlikely to grok a given piece of folk wisdom unless you thought about it and already navigated a situation in which it would apply. So for a teenager or young adult, they sound trite. But for someone with a couple decades of life behind them, they're concise.

Now that applies to the kind of clichés you'd find in a dictionary. The kind you see in this article/comic strip? These are just pseudo-zen bullshit peddled by self-help industry scammers. They pretend to be actionable, but are completely empty. I wish people would stop with those - not on the grounds that unsolicited advice is somehow bad, but on the grounds that these particular pieces of advice are objectively useful only to sell books and training courses.

I completely agree with you, except I don't think all the advice in the comic fits that description. I think yoga in particular is an extremely powerful mental (and physical!) exercise.

Do you have any example of the advice they gave you that you "benefited immensely from?". Because I got this kind of advice a million times and it only made me feel worse.

Also, when this kind of advice came from my family, they were trying to minimize my problems (so they wouldn't have to do anything to seriously help), not help me.

Yes. A coworker once told me I talk too fast on the phone. After getting angry for a moment that someone would think they can tell me how to speak, I realized they were right and that other people were having trouble hearing me and following what I was saying. I worked on it, and now people compliment me on my phone skills. For the past 5 years I've worked from home and am on hours of calls a day. Immense benefit, and I will always be grateful they said something.

One really interesting aspect of empathy is that it seems to have evolved as a pain avoidance tool - you see someone else burn their hand, see them react by saying "Ouch!", and you feel a shadow of the pain they're in, and don't make the same mistake. When we feel too much empathy for people - e.g. someone we're close to is in pain - often people give advice that is selfish - you're in pain, and it's hurting me, so while I want to help, what I'm really doing is trying to minimize my own suffering by (often inadvertently) minimizing yours. Helping other people is hard, both because we often don't know what to do, and because even our best intentions can get distorted by our ape brains.

And to be clear, the advice in the comic is bad advice when it's given in those contexts. For good advice that's shaped kind of the same way, I'd suggest reading "Peace is Every Step" by Thich Naht Hanh - lmk and I can send you a copy (It's on libgen). Alternatively, reading the stoics (as someone else suggested in this thread) would be a good place to start.

The core of my beliefs is stoicism, although I never looked into their original works, my therapist told me that what he taught me is stoicism.

I basically make peace with the fact that hardships in life are unavoidable.

People should avoid giving advice to others suffering from mental health issues. It's reasonable to point that out and refer to a professional. That said,

Be more than words. If I am telling someone to seek professional advice, I would help them with the task in a meaningful way such as contributing financially, finding information for them, being their speaker or support for coming out to others. Ask them what they would need help with instead of guessing or provide options when they can't come up with something.

If you are close or live nearby, you can help with chores and food. Good food helps and it's easy to end up eating garbage when you are down.

This is exactly what I do, now that I've climbed out of the hole, I extend my hand to help others come out.

I'm very open about things that I went through, and it validates people's feelings, and hopefully gives them some optimism when they see it's possible to overcome this.

I've got a few of my friends to actually seek professional help (and it helped all of them, at least a bit). And the way I go about this is first telling of the issues I had, and then saying that every single person (even the most normal person) would have a lot to benefit from occasionally going to a therapist. I also compliment my friends when I notice change in their behaviour.

I'd love to be able to help them financially as well, but as a student that is not an option.

Yoga was the one that resonated with me. The best piece of advice I ever got (though not explicitly criticised here, but along the same vein) was to take deep breaths to control my emotions. Most of the time my mental health problems were not physical, but stemmed from my own emotions, so these exercises were very effective. Unsolicited mental health advice drove a lot of my mental and emotional development as a child. Maybe I'm an anomaly, but I suspect others shared my experience.

Hey, yoga is actually awesome, I have to agree there. But I always ignored that advice until I came up with going to yoga class on my own.

I think this is important in understanding the issue here. It's not that the advice is bad, it's that it is usually tone deaf and timed wrongly, making it hard to be received.

While I agree with you, I also know that sometimes, people just want to talk and they just want you to listen to them. They don't want your advice and they don't want you to 'fix' their problems. Just listen to them.

Understanding this point has significantly improved my relationship with my wife, but honestly - I cannot comprehend the mindset. It feels like a fundamental difference in world processing.

For me, the quickest and surest way to reduce anxiety about some problem is to find candidate solutions. I don't even have to act on them, just knowing that there's a possible path out is enough for me to stop worrying (and sometimes do nothing, and then the problem solves itself, because it was never that big in the first place). But then it seems that a good chunk of the population just wants to have their anxiety validated (and their "catastrophizing", per the other comment in the thread). Which I guess would be fine, if it made their anxiety go away. But it doesn't.

I think you're in a really great situation in life and mental state where "having candidate solutions" was enough to deal with the majority of anxious situations. I think a lot of people are in situations where they can see that their candidate solutions may not have the best chance of success, or that they don't fully resolve the issues, or that there's great residual uncertainty remaining.

Furthermore (my GF pointed this out to me once) - do you ever tell stories about dumb shit you had to do, AFTER you resolved the situation? For example, talk about dumb hoops you had to jump through at work (after you've jumped through them), or some work around in some recipe (because you screwed up at the market)? Think about the motivating factors in telling those stories, and how telling those stories makes you feel, and what you expect in the form of feedback when telling those stories. It's not identical, but it can be similar to what's going on people tell these stories BEFORE resolving the issue.

Sometimes people engage in these situations for multiple reasons. They're looking for their anxiety to be validated, not because they want it to be go away (they're often perfectly understanding of the actual concrete actions they need or can take), but because they want to bond and share and be human. Does it make it all go away? No. But that's not what they're looking for - they're looking to discharge some bad mental state. They're not looking for the "real fix", they're trying to clear their heads of their immediate pain.

No one wants to be interrupted in the middle of a tirade about how stupid Verizon is to be told to switch to Comcast. No one wants to be interrupted while raging against ${politician} with "just vote against ${politician}".

Both approaches (identifying and following up on courses of actions to resolve situations, and short-term venting to keep the mind clear) should work hand in hand - they are complementary, not opposite. While it's tempting to say that clearly the actually resolving strategy is superior, because it could theoretically work in isolation (while venting will clearly not work in isolation in most cases), I don't think it's really realistic.

Anyhow, I hope your strategy keeps working that well for you.

> Sometimes people engage in these situations for multiple reasons. They're looking for their anxiety to be validated

In these situations I do everything to not validate the anxiety, but still be understanding of their feelings.

As somebody who had OCD, and sometimes sought out validations from others, I know it is was not beneficial for me to have somebody validate it. For example you wouldn't tell me it is valid that I cannot sleep because I didn't close the door just right (and yes, OCD anxieties are this frivolous); you would tell me I'm wasting my time and energy thinking about that (and yes, that is the advice that worked for me).

My solution to anxiety is to throw the anxious thought out. Like meditation techniques where you try to ignore all your thoughts, here you would just ignore the anxiety inducing ones. You just set your mind on more productive thoughts.

I used to think like you but then ran into problems at work where all the obvious solutions were things I already thought of and wouldn't work for different reasons. So when my partner at the time or my dad would try to help with solutions to a problem she couldn't completely grok that wouldn't actually help it just made me more frustrated. I just needed my partner to validate my frustration, be there for me to rant with the understanding that this wouldn't last forever but was a shitty moment to deal with...

Huh, I think you're right. I've definitely experienced the things that you're describing. It's frustrating to hear an advice that you've considered, rejected for good reasons, and with those reasons being too complicated to explain to the other party in the scope of a conversation.

I'll think about it more.

I read somewhere -- it's probably a huge oversimplification -- but that when men talk about their problems, they want to solve those problems. when women talk about their problems, they just want to discuss the problems, or their significance.

This has helped me out a lot with my wife, and it's something i try to be mindful of whenever i talk to ANYONE now -- men or women. This idea was helpful because it raised in me the question: is the person talking to you for you to help solve their problems, or for you to just listen and help them get it off their chest?

Although i'm still in the problem-solving mindset, looking at it in this light helps me to at least think of the person's needs, instead of my own desires.

More than that, sometimes looking for a fix becomes the act of perpetuating a problem. If can act as a stop point away from searching for deeper understanding of the problem and thus proper response.

But that’s probably just for simpler or longer term problems than falling off a cliff or an oncoming train.

There’s a lot of suffering in the world - especially right now. The universe itself can be especially cruel, for that matter. So personally I try to be kind and generous when I can.

> I dislike this attitude. The idea is to convince people that unsolicited (mental health) advice is pointless and the behavior change the author would like to see is for people to stop giving these clichéd wisdoms.

We don't know the author's actual motivations. They may be suggesting that you should think about how your message will be received before delivering it, ask before offering it, wait until it is asked for, consider how you say it, think about whether it is necessary to deliver, or to not offer it at all.

As for mental health advice, that's something altogether different. Unless you are extremely sensitive and have a solid understanding of human psychology (i.e. not this is what worked for me) and understand that person's background, offering advice is a risky proposition. Also note that giving advice is different from offering support.

Yes, more than likely you're right. This was not my first interpretation of the comic, and it rubbed me entirely the wrong way. Your interpretation has wise advice, and I will keep it in mind.

> What this kind of work suggests is an attitude of, "My problems are so [explitive] huge that you can't possibly understand so don't even bother trying to help me".

I had a similar reaction to these comics, though I think you captured my objection better.

> Personally I've benefited immensely from exactly this kind of unsolicited advice, especially at a younger age, and it really did help me

I suspect that this might be a factor of how apt the advice is to the exact moment, and how skillfully it is delivered.