Social-media "philosophy"

I ran across this list on Facebook reels and I’m feeling persnickety. I have been seeing too much of this bullshit “advice” on social media lately. So I’mma pick at it a bit. The list is entitled:

5 Laws of Life I Wish I Knew Sooner

And here goes. Bold is the list, normal font’s my response. I won’t number them because the Substack editor turns numbers into lists against my will…

Never trust someone who praises everyone. Fake people love everyone to hide who they really are.

Okay, maybe it’s just symptomatic of me being a magnet for emotionally abusive assholes, but I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who praised everyone. But if I did meet someone who praised everyone? As long as it’s sincere praise, I would actually find that behavior commendable. It means that person took the time and effort to find something good to say about the person they’re addressing. It marks a person who wants to build other people up rather than tear them down. Sorry for the cliché, but for once it’s on point.

The people I have learned not to trust are the ones who flatter and especially, for some reason, the ones who immediately want hugs from a complete stranger upon first meeting. (I have found this to be a fairly reliable indicator of women, particularly, who are afflicted with personality disorders. I have no idea why it’s women — maybe men are aware they’d come off creepy? But that’s what I’ve seen.) But there is a difference between flattery and praise. I won’t get into it here but if you think about it, you might possibly figure out what I mean.

I do agree that fake people love everyone to hide who we really are. But the concept of “my true self” or “my inner self” or “making my outside match my inside” or “being my authentic self” has been weaponized to prop up being fake in the first place. I tend to interpret people who employ these thought constructs as fake people, and I’m usually right.

Most people don’t care about your problems. 90% don’t care, and 10% are secretly happy it’s happening to you.

Rather, I would say that 90% of people don’t know you and don’t know about your problems and that it’s impossible to predict which of them would care if they did know. The percentage is actually more than ninety-nine percent, because ninety-nine percent of eight billion (current world human population) is 7,920,000,000, which would mean you’d have to know eighty million people. Do you personally know eighty million people? No. Stop worrying about it.

Of the maybe thousand people worldwide who might be aware of most of you, only a small percentage of those are aware of your problems. Some of them won’t care. Some of them do care but don’t know how to respond. Some care, know how to respond, and don’t have the resources to carry out that response. That’s why only a few have responded. Those are the ones who know about your problems, know how to fix your problems, and are well-placed TO fix your problems. You can’t expect your 80-year-old grandmother to put out your housefire, y’know. She doesn’t even own a fire truck, right? All problems work like that. The people who want to fix them and can fix them, both at the same time, are the ones who fix them.

I think where we fall down on the believing that people care about us, and I include myself in that “us” because I do it too, is that we tell ourselves that we only have a narrow interpretation of which behaviors express caring and which don’t. And so we set up these strict expectations that no one can match because they don’t know what we actually want. Ladies, you’re pointing fingers at the guys right now. Guys, you’re laughing at the ladies. WE ALL do this. It’s not sex-based at all.

Now. There are times a problem has a specific range of possible solutions and most people know what those solutions are, and if people who you know to be equipped to solve your problem are not doing so even though you could reasonably expect them to try, that might be a time for questioning their motives. But that’s not going to be true in every case. If it’s a real problem, problems are hard. If the difficulty is also unfamiliar, people are going to hesitate and try to figure it out before they act. Yelling at them or being all butthurt isn’t going to make them move any faster.

And it feels like whoever wrote this “law” for Facebook views is trying to make people paranoid about their social circle. That’s cruel. Don’t listen to this shit.

And let’s face it: when have you ever cared about 100% of the problems of 100% of the people YOU know? Nah, don’t even start. It’s okay. We know.

Speak with understanding. Don’t just talk — know the weight of your words before you use them.

A common trope on the internet is giving people “advice” about social situations that has the end result of the advised person shutting down because they have to consider too many angles before they ever do anything. We make it all too complicated. Nobody has time to do master’s-thesis-level research before advising their friend through an awkward situation or a breakup or a firing. We only have time to do the best we can in the moment. We can course-correct later if it turns out we were wrong.

This advice has some limited utility if you’re neurodiverse and have a tendency to not consider someone else’s situation before saying words they might find unusually hurtful — normally the words would be taken in a benign way, but the listener’s situation assigns an additional meaning to the words that really bothers the listener. But you can’t go to a party with fifty people in it having done extended research on all fifty people’s back stories. The only way you can avoid offending anyone is if you keep your conversational subject matter as bland and inconsequential as possible.

And guess what that’s called? That’s called “just talking.” You never have to consider the weight of your words if the content of your speech is meaningless.

The best phrases you can arm yourself with for meaningful conversation are the following:

I don’t know.
I’m sorry. I must have been mistaken.
I don’t understand. Would you mind telling me a little more about this?
I was not aware of that. I’ll educate myself more about it. Can you suggest sources?
Actually, I do know a lot about this and here’s my take, but we can agree to disagree.

And in that vein. We place too much emphasis on preparing for everything (except, ironically, for personal assaults, natural disasters, and civil unrest? Weird, that) and not enough on pivoting and making it right when we fuck up. This is a problem. We should do something about it.

Unhappiness often comes from staying in the wrong place. If it doesn’t feel right — move. Change your environment, change your life.

This is truly the mantra of the deadbeat dad.

One, you can’t just keep moving your whole life. If you try it, you’re going to hit middle age and have zero roots and be one missed paycheck away from living in your car. (Ask me how I know.) Unless everyone you know is an utter bastard, and this can happen, sticking around and investing in relationships with those people will help insulate you from most things that would make you seriously unhappy. It looks good on your employment record, too, which is another investment in your long-term success.

Two, OP surely has never heard the expression, No matter where you go, there you are. If YOU are the reason you’re unhappy — and sometimes you are — all you’re going to do if you bail is end up in an unfamiliar place with the same unhappiness you had when you left.

Three, you can certainly change your life without moving. When I got married, my life became different, but I stayed in the same geographical area for another two-and-a-third years. You need to learn to cope with your discomfort where you are and find ways to solve it. Unhappiness comes from not being able to change a situation, not from staying in a specific geographical area. There will be times when you won’t be safe to attempt to make those changes; if you’re being abused, certainly you should leave. But this sounds like OP is suggesting you should bail if you just don’t feel catered to. That’s not a recipe for healthy living.

This is kid stuff and people are eating it up like it’s holy writ. Tsk.

And finally, Number Five:

Take smart risks, not impulsive ones. Calculated risks bring success. Being rash builds regret.

Okay, Mister Leave-Town-If-Your-Meals-Aren’t-At-Six-P.M.-Sharp.

I mean, this one isn’t completely wrong, but it’s pretty hypocritical. And by “not completely wrong,” I mean it is not always true. You can calculate risks and still fall on your fucking face, and sometimes we do rash things that turn out to be the best decisions we’ve ever made. The only reason we even need to measure the rashness of a decision is BECAUSE we don’t know ahead of time how it’s going to turn out. There are too many other factors beyond our control that will determine the outcome.

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And if I could come up with only one Law of Life, it would be this: Trust less and analyze more. But nobody’s going to take that advice so, whatever.