This is part 1 of a series on bad advice, where they come from, and their consequences. This one in particular deals with the racket of ideas which surrounds us. Part 2 focuses on the racket of self-help, and Part 3 deals with the deep anger which comes from following bad advice.
There's an angry part of me that feels like i was wildly bamboozled about what was actually valuable growing up, and then seeing decades later how miserable the people who told me those things are and the hell their decisions led them to.
From this tweet
I'm going to use the term "rugpull", borrowed from this piece by Visakanv, which comes from the known idiom "pulling the rug under someone". It is essentially a sense of betrayal, and I am going to focus here on the ones related to one's general life situation, and the assumptions behind what is valuable in life, rather than the personal ones, which I would instead label as "personal betrayals".
A common rugpull for people today is the typical path of corporate work, initiated by parents and peers with good intentions who nudge young people to pursue financial stability, but who then realize that not only are they quite miserable in their job and most of what led to it, but the whole thing feels a lot more uncertain than what they were led to believe. Not only is a 'normal' corporate job not that easy to get, because you need credentials and to stand out in a sea of people who likewise have those same credentials and play the game of networking, how stable they are becomes far more questionable when you realize all the psychological effects that come from doing a job that you hate, the financial crises which happen fairly regularly in our world, and all the money you need to spend just to maintain that job, such as the car for the long commute, and all the things you buy to compensate for your lack of time and energy spent at the job.
This piece isn't specifically about corporate jobs, but I'm starting with this example because it is by far the most common form of rugpull. Everyone sooner or later gets rugpulled, for the simple reason that the world is far too complex for anyone to have a clear picture of it, especially when they are young and are asked what they want to do for a living. What makes careers, and in general one's life direction, so prone to rugpulls is that they are very rigid in our times, in the sense that you need to decide early on on what education you want to have, which leads to a certain subset of possible jobs you could have, and it isn't easy to transition to something else.
This is why many people double down on their miserable job, because the time and energy needed to learn other skills is a significant commitment, and they might be in a job which is so draining for them that they are not willing to invest resources into something else.
Because life is so complex, people then try to communicate summarized versions of what they've learned, or what they've read, which is of course what advice are. But a major problem with advice is that the ones which spread to other people are not those which have been tested over time, but rather the ones which sound good or that people adopt to resolve their cognitive dissonance. It is very rarely the case that the people giving advice are worth emulating to begin with, what is more common is that someone who is unhappy in their life latches onto certain ideas that make them feel better about themselves, and then communicates those ideas to other people, as if they consciously sat down and chose their current life with full knowledge of what could be possible, based on their own idea.
This is the first problem with advice, the fact that it spreads not based on its own merit, but based on what the person saying it wants to believe in. Most people double down on their misery because it's easier to do so than make a change and looking like a fool, which is why their advice is inherently untrustworthy, because they do not care about the consequences of giving them, only about rationalizing their decisions.
Furthermore, there is no feedback loop which corrects for bad advice in our atomized world. This is ultimately what a real culture is supposed to do, provide a stable supportive context that can help people find direction in the chaos of life, a context which emerges from a natural bottom-up process of people living together and finding increasingly harmonious ways to do so. The culture's wisdom is reflected in how sustainable it is, because unhealthy cultures cannot maintain themselves for very long, whereas the healthy ones can stand the test of time. In our world however, there is no lasting culture, only a racket of ideas.
A racket is different from a market with regards to its correcting feedback loops. Markets in practice are far from perfect of course, but there is still a general self-correcting feedback loop in the general dynamic between supply and demand. It would be naive to say that the most successful companies are the ones making the best products within their tradeoff allocation 1, but in practice a company that has been in business for many years at least gives you some type of guarantee that their products work, because otherwise they wouldn't be able to make a profit. This is why we can confidently buy a computer at a store and know that it will work, because markets have feedback loops when it comes to products and their basic functionality, even if excellence is difficult to find.
Advice on the other hand is far more intangible than physical products, which is why there is no such thing as a market for ideas. What we have instead is a racket of ideas, one where ideas spread not because they are good, but because they are good at spreading, because for instance they allow people to not face themselves or not face a difficult truth, or because they fill someone's mind with platitudes which they will not tend to examine because they sound familiar.
Another major problem with advice is that our world changes so much that what is sensible to do for one generation can be a terrible idea for the next generation. There was a time where a university degree genuinely made you stand out. In our times however, degrees are so common—and also inflated in that they have become easier to get—that they have become a new baseline, and don't really make anyone stand out.
That being said, in the case of degrees, it is often still necessary to get one to be considered as competent in the eyes of an employer, not because they genuinely teach you anything, but because they still give the general signal that someone meets a baseline level of intelligence and commitment, even if they aren't a guarantee of much beyond such a baseline. Therefore, even though degrees do not guarantee success in any shape or form, getting one is often a decent recommendation for most, because we still live in a world of credentials, since those are the easiest proxy to verify someone's competence in a highly complex world.
It's difficult to find one specific piece of advice which is clearly outdated, because another facet of the complexity of life is that contradicting (big-picture) ideas can be equally valid, depending on the context and what type of person you may be. However the specifics have changed a lot, which means that advice dealing with specificities rather than attitude or life direction tend to age like milk.
For instance, it is true that most people waste away their time, energy and focus in front of a screen, which means that there is much wisdom in the general attitude of spending less time staring at them, but looking at my life, the most radical ideas I have ever come across have been on the internet, and the most genuine and conscious people I have learned about were through the internet. Not that modelling your life based on some internet personality is not deeply problematic most of the time, but there is a way of getting a glimpse of the sheer possibility of life which can only come from the frictionless aspect of the internet. If I lived my life completely offline, maybe I would be a better employee, a more functional person on the surface, but I don't think I would be living an authentic life at all, because my life would be dominated by my surroundings, which tend to be shaped by fear and unconsciousness.
Advice given by older people is more often than not advice on how to be remain the same person, but doing things better, when they are not telling you how to be like them. The ethos of working hard is one I can get behind, and becomes even more important as people seem to become ever more lazy and inattentive to what's around them, but the problem is that putting on blinders and not questioning your situation and direction are not virtues in and of themselves.
It's hardly realistic to expect that you can question everything, and deprogram yourself from all influences, and I'm not sure that the latter is even a good idea even if it was achievable, but at the same time working hard can only be meaningful if the collective you are serving, and the ideas you are operating from, resonate with your conscious self.
There is a lot of backlash over the idiom of "follow your passion", and I would agree that it is naive if you do not follow it intelligently, and if you don't know when to be more practical, but overall it points to very important aspects of living well, which is that you only have one life to live and it is precious, too precious to waste it on a job you hate, and also it is impossible to fight yourself over the entirety of your life doing something you do not want. If you are going to do things for a living, you have to find activities which are meaningfully resonant with you, which doesn't mean that they are necessarily pleasurable or fun, but it means that you at least find them important, interesting, valuable in some kind of way.
All this to say that the attitude of "working hard" is meaningless without a greater context, whether it is some life project you find important, or a collective you want to contribute to. Struggling against resistance needs some type of direction for the whole thing to be bearable for us. Older generations often complain of how lazy younger people are, and I think they are right in some ways, 2 but what they are not willing to examine is that people aren't willing to work hard if they don't feel aligned with the collective they are a part of.
It's much easier to work hard at something when you know that you can realistically buy a house, and everything else that you or your family might need, based on a single income. It's much harder on the other hand to be optimistic about the whole thing if houses become so expensive that you need two incomes to buy one, when cars also become more expensive and regulated due to environmental concerns, and when daycare for children needs to be taken care by the parents alone, because life has become so atomized that the grandparents might not be involved in the lives of their grandchildren.
The awareness of my environment and how it shapes me has definitely been the biggest insight in my life, and what allowed lasting change to emerge. What I notice again and again is how quickly people are to blame others, especially younger people, for their lack of results, but they are rarely interested in examining the larger social trends which lead them to said results. It's this constant blindness to the broader contexts we live within which makes the racket of advice rather useless in practice, because most advice come from a context totally different than the one which the person receiving them experiences.
There is no such thing as universal advice, for the same reason that there is no such thing as universal medicine, because what allows beneficial change to occur in one person can also be what leads another person to have more problems. If you try to account for every single situation, you either get impotent platitudes, or you get utter and complete chaos, advice so convoluted that no one can feel inspired by it and apply it to their own life.
Advice that tries to apply to a lot of people comes from the general attitude of "being realistic", with regards to ambitions for instance. It is true that breaking out of the mold and rejecting the usual career paths that most people go down is more often than not unconclusive, in that most people fail to meet their goals. But first of all failure is not an end state, because you can learn a great deal from it, far more than staying safe your entire life. And secondly, it is important to realize that all the metaphorical crabs in a bucket are being realistic from their own limited perspective, in that they are paying attention to one another and noticing that none of them have successfully escaped.
If all you base your judgement on is the average, the norm, or your surroundings, what you get is not the so-called "wisdom of the crowd", but instead it is mediocrity, unconsciousness, a life of quiet misery. This obviously doesn't mean that going against the crowd necessarily makes you wise, it can easily turn you into an insufferable contrarian, but it means that conscious qualities such as love, freedom, relaxation, wisdom, dilligence, curiosity and humor are not the norm, which means that a life that honors those qualities is not built by "being realistic" or "doing what one is told".
Such a conscious life is not primarily built around the self and its demands, which include survival, certainty, comfort, pleasure, power, status, and much more, but it is built around a recognition of something greater than you, the astounding fractal quality of nature, the selfless love of a relationship, the curiosity of innocence of children, and of course the astounding mystery of sheer being, of simple existence itself.
None of those things are realistic, because "realism" is itself a projection of the self onto Reality. Direct experience is simply too baffling for the self to tolerate, which is why it has to contend with its own representations of it, and why those who reject enchantment often have a blind belief in the ordinary. 3
1 By "tradeoff allocation" I mean how a product can be cheap and decent, or it can be expensive and great, which are two different allocations of price and quality. Neither one is necessarily 'better', because life always works in terms of tradeoffs, but most things are not Pareto optimal in practice, which is to say that it is often possible to make one aspect better without the other aspects worse.
2 Although if you put older people in the same environments of constant distractions, I am willing to bet that they wouldn't be much better, considering how many older people are also addicted to their screens and social media feeds.
3 From Darren Allen, see this piece on his Substack.
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Betrayal Trust Advice Racket Generations
2025-11-24