Two weeks ago, as I sat on a rickety folding chair under the Main Green’s blue September sky, President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 gave me and the rest of the incoming first-year class a piece of advice: Risk failure. It was amid this guidance that she herself, through the small, brave act of sitting at a table of strangers, met her future husband. Her anecdote felt benevolent and thoughtful, but also somewhat futile. Although it is Brown University’s 262nd academic year, it’s only my first, and it seems as though everyone has an opinion on how I should go about it.
Convocation was hardly the first time I have been confronted by an onslaught of advice. Throughout the entire college application process, from essays to decisions to transitions, advice runs rampant. Go to almost any family function, website, podcast or teacher and they will impart their, oftentimes contradictory, two cents. It has become impossible to turn off. There is nearly always some wisdom and good intent in the words shared but, in our internet age, advice-giving has lost its personal quality.
Advice is relational in its essence. In the past it has been a way to pass down generational or experiential wisdom. Whether it be by listening to grandparents speak of decades past or friends corroborating your very modern struggles, the fact that this counsel is imparted by people that matter to you is what gives it meaning. As I think about the best advice I have received, it has been from those who know me and those who I aspire to be like in one way or another. When advice becomes removed from the interpersonal it loses its efficacy.
This shift away from the personal stems largely from the online obsession with self-improvement. Sponsorships and partnerships provide numerous endorsements of the products and experiences to buy that will assure happiness, love or success. This commodification of self-improvement makes it so that the countless self-help blogs and social media accounts that give so-called miracle advice are more interested in profiting off of engagement than actually solving problems. We get quantity over quality, oversaturating society with unsolicited and impersonal advice. No situation is left unadvised.
And because of our constant exposure, this ambush of maxims has no doubt leaked into our everyday lives. We have all become that chatty distant relative at Thanksgiving, spreading constant counsel because we feel we must have an opinion on everything that can be neatly explained in a one-line solution. Bold, unapologetic, highly simplified: We have crafted our lives and experiences into our own forms of Barbara Kruger’s artwork.
All of this is not to say that advice is a dead craft. Since being at Brown, I have received helpful guidance from habituated students over coffee and empathetic counsel from family over FaceTimes. I have also spoken with friends starting off in new cities and received letters and emails from those I love. It is an incredible gift that I have people who care about me and my experiences.
Thus, we should give advice sparingly and authentically to those who want to receive it. We should receive advice with intention and appreciation — not from infographics and self-help books. Experience and relationships have power that advice only strengthens. Let us lean into that. Let us use advice as a good deed for those we care about. Let us use advice to grow individually and interpersonally.
Talia Berkwits ’29 can be reached at talia_berkwits@brown.edu. Please send responses to this op-ed to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
