January: On Advice Whoring in the Art of Internal Cave-diving
Or, alternatively titled, “Exploring the addictive tendency to suck down opinions and origin stories shared in online forums, articles, and listicles, in hopes of discovering a figment of truth about the self by which to navigate one’s own internal cave.”
Part I: Advice Whoring 1010
First: A second-person cave-diving metaphor to draw you into the scene
You wandered into a cave this evening. It looked like the giant, gaping butthole of a mountain, located on the mountain’s rocky, southern slope about midway down (this is not the reason you entered it — just a parallel you noticed).
The cave both attracted and repelled you, like a river in flood. You had to walk in.
Now it is nighttime. It is dark, too dark to see anything. You do not know the way out. It smells like rat feces down here. Or bigfoot. Or a really dehydrated bear , with mange. You run your right hand against the rock wall. It is wet and cold, and the moss you touch is more like seaweed. The only sounds are the echoes of your footsteps. The only guide you have through this place is your right hand.
It takes an hour to walk a hundred yards. You have a panic attack and collapse on the ground. (The ground is made of leeches. And the leeches are made of mayonnaise).
Or, imagine this.
You saw a picture of a cave online and thought it looked freaking sick. So you went looking for it. You bought a map beforehand from a man named Rodrick you met at the general store in town because a guy on Reddit said that a guy named Rodrick in town has maps. Rodrick gives you directions.
He tells you to leave in the morning. He also gives you a lamp, a compass, and step by step directions on how to walk through this cave and out into the other side, through the mountain.
You stop by every other general store within 50 miles. Each Rodrick gives you the same type, though different brand, of tools. And sends you on his way.
Let’s say you actually go for the cave even though you’ve spent all 5 of your vacation days from work collecting tools, maps, and torches from men named Rodrick.
During the day, the cave is well lit (don’t ask me how), and smells like sand. It is beautiful and open. You move quickly, marking every turn you make on each map so you can find your way back. You’re carrying a ton of tools on your back, but a back is, after all, for lifting.
But the deeper you go, the darker it gets, until it’s too dark to see anything. All your lamps are running out. You’re getting sore. Then you see it. None of the maps match this part of the cave. There are tunnels where there should be walls, and walls where there should be tunnels.
The lights given to you go out. The only sounds are the echoes of your footsteps. The only guide you have through this place is your right hand.
It takes an hour to walk a hundred yards. You have a panic attack and collapse on the ground. (The ground is made of leeches. And the leeches are made of mayonnaise).
What I am talking about is sucking down advice when diving into the cave of yourself
This is the cave of our internal worlds.
The entryway to most of our caves is usually kept pretty clean. There are cool lights and stuff, unique formations of mineral, water, and ancient rock. You might even let a lot of people in there to look around. Cool cave! They say. It might be a little spooky, or dimly lit. But the exit is always right there.
In the back of the cave where the tours end is where the tunnels start, and the caverns.
Nobody wants to go into the tunnels. Even Gollum, once he was in there, screamed like a Banshee and tried to flee from “Ol’ Sheelob.”
Real caves freak me the fuck out. Metaphorically, I also do not want to dive into the darkest, most disorienting and oppressive parts of my being. I fear that I will get lost. That I might never come back out. That I will starve. Or be attacked by giant spiders.
But when there is a huge influx in the unknown, in life, it’s like, you have no choice but to go in.
Maybe you don’t. I don’t know, but Thomas Jefferson might. At least it sounds like he he does when he wrote, reportedly (and dramatically),
“If you want to get something you never had, you have to do things you’ve never done.” — TJ
Building off of what TJ said, I’d argue that if you want to find what you’ve never found, you need to go a place you’ve never been.
Where is that place? Carl Jung says, “That which you most need will be found where you least want to look.”
Sick.
Getting advice on how to navigate a trip like this is like asking someone else for pieces of a puzzle they do not have. Maybe it looks like yours. Maybe their cave has a similar shape as yours. But they’re all different, every single one.
Still. Getting advice is helpful, and part of what makes being human so cool. This is especially nice in person. Mom probably knows your cave better than BabyMaker69 does. And maybe she has some tips for navigating the 22nd turn in the third passage because let me tell you, your dad drove her crazy in the third passage.
But advice whoring rarely occurs in real life, maybe because you don’t want to pester real people with your same self-centered questions over and over and over. It’s online. It’s on Reddit. On Quora. Google. WebMD. Where you can gobble down virtual advice at a rate you could never take it in from real people.
As a first-rate advice whore, and as someone currently standing on the brink of lots of unknowns in life— having moved across country to start a grad program, broken up with my long term partner, starting a new job, and preparing to thru hike the Colorado Trail this summer — I’ve been itching for advice everywhere. Even reading about fleece jackets has become a monumental task, and involves several Reddit threads of fleece information I never wanted to know.
It feels fitting now, more than ever, to explore where this tendency to advice whore comes from inside myself, how it functions in my navigation of the unknown, and what I might be able to learn about it.
This first spontaneous Medium essay of the year — a project I’m starting on to follow my curiosity through writing with less serioiusness — hovers around these questions. It has lots of detours. And has turned out hideously long. But fuck it.
*Quick disclaimer: The term, “advice-whoring” does not relay my feelings about people who have lots of sex — no judgement — it’s just fun to say.
Questions I am essay-ing to understand.
- Why, and when, do some of us get so wrapped into sucking down advice, stories, and and answers online? (Why, and when, do I become an advice whore?)
- How does this effect the process of discovering, and creating, our own personal truths? (How does holding a map to someone else’s cave effect the navigation of my own? Are there any tools that do transfer over?)
- How might the awareness of this tendency illuminate more effective navigational strategies? (When I stop slut-shaming yourself for Reddit spiraling, and see what you learn)
Part II: Context
First, the distinction between Internal Cave-Diving and External Climbing
In one, you’re inside going down.
In the other, you’re outside going up.
But really. There is a difference between asking Google for a banana bread recipe and asking “Why is my elbow quaking every morning.” A difference that feels obvious, but is, I think, helpful to specify.
It has to do with the boundaries of the question, its origins, and the effects of reading responses has on your mood, and connection with yourself.
A banana bread recipe is a specific, actionable set of externally-set information. The answer isn’t within you. You suck at baking and you suck at math. Trust the first female blogger you find whose husband loves banana bread so much and and whose family grew up eating it at their lake house in upstate New York on holidays and whose recipe comes from her mom’s European grandma (who, I would add, is in no way a verifiably good cook).
With a quaking elbow, there are no boundaries. The origin is internal. And the answers might lie with a doctor, or in anxiety. They probably won’t be found on Reddit. But still, you look for them.
When you do ask Quora, or, more accurately, find a thread where other people have asked your same question, even the most sensible answer doesn’t satiate the feeling that something is wrong with me. Each response perpetuates that feeling.
If you’re elbow is quaking, you should probably see a doctor.
The point is that in whoring online advice, you manage to become both more informed and less assured in yourself.
Nuances and cool parts of advice whoring
Like all categories, these two questions are on a spectrum.
At one end, there are highly actionable questions like, “How do I make banana bread?”
At the other, there are deeply personal questions like, “Why am I so afraid of people wearing neon-colored polo shirts?”
In the middle, there are questions that are both deeply personal and actionable, like “How do I become a writer” (something I Googled with slight variation 41 times in the two months following college graduation).
These questions can make you feel like you’ve learned something when you read other people’s stories.
And maybe you do. I read Aaron Teasedale’s, Alex Roddie’s, Ron Spoomer’s, and several other writers’ origin stories like a bajillion times. I wanted to know: How did they do it? And what could I take from their stories to inform how I might do it?
This is the way advice works. What is so cool about being human is that there are these universal problems, processes, and successes we share across bodies, disciplines, and time— the hero’s journey, the artist’s way, the path of the Buddha. They remain consistent from person to person. The tools transfer from cave to cave.
Which tools transfer?
- Tools of technique, like pickaxes.
Someone said on Reddit to “Stop starting every concluding sentence in a paragraph with, ‘And so,’ to sound less pretentious.” And so, I did. Now I sound very humble and credible.
- Tools of map-reading and compass alignment.
What is your true north? Re-calibrate compass to navigate through the crevices of your frontal lobe.
There are probably a lot of other tools that transfer but I’m getting bored.
Let’s move on.
But first, one final note to summarize all this
Sucking down advice is like killing hitchhikers, or eating McDonalds. Do it every now and then, and you’ll probably get away with it. Too much, and, well, you’ll wind up lost.
With your thinking process so over-informed, your feelings so measured against others’, and your intuition so dependent on what ‘makes sense’ to someone else, you collapse into the combination of all the advice put together — into analysis paralysis.
Here is where I hurriedly explain to you that it isn’t just me who is, instinctually, a slut for soliciting advice from strangers online, and thus try to extrapolate this personal-ish essay of my own experience to a wider audience but I’ll actually take a pretty long time to do it and so you might end up a bit out of breath at the end, kind of like I am when as I read this paragraph out loud
And I’ll explain it with the tools of a real, swaggering academic. With math. Advice-whore math
- 5.16 billion people use the internet each day.
- 1 in 10 are old men at the public library watching porn.
- 2 in 10 are people in developing countries using Facebook and basic services.
- 2 in 10 are like, computer coders, or something.
- 1 in 10 are your grandparents, high school friends, and people from schools that were close to yours when you grew up and you added because they were attractive but you’ve never talked to them.
- The other 4 people are Tony Robbins, e-gurus, investor bros, writing advice writers, commercial memoirists, Reddit users, WebMD writers, Amazon reviewers — people who want to shove their thoughts down your throat.
Some of the advice feels good. Some of feels bad. All of it sells.
Along with calculating those statistics, I did some more advice-whore math on Google Trends to see what other people have been sucking down.
The keyword, what does it mean, on Google Trends, hovers between 90 and 100 percent consistent search frequency all year long (The most searches come from southern states, for some reason).
Some recent examples that are trending in the last day.
- What does it mean that I’m craving beans so hard?
- What does it mean if she calls me daddy? (This one is most frequently asked in Indiana)
- What does it mean that I’m coughing so much?
- What does it mean if I’m bisexual? (Most frequently asked in Texas and California)
How to, What/Why am I, Why is my (insert body part), and What Should are other big keywords.
- Why am I so jealous and insecure?
- Why is my butt so itchy all the time?
- Why am I wanting to move out of my house?
- Why am I obsessed with microwaving marshmallows?
- What should I do if I’m depressed?
- What should I wear tomorrow?
- Should I break up with my boyfriend?
- Why is my body so sore in the afternoon?
- Why are my calves bigger than my thighs?
- Why don’t I get hard during casual sex?
- Why don’t I get wet during casual sex?
Super fun Google Trend finding: these kinds of searches — looking to avail knowledge of the self or body — dip during the day, and peak at night. Specifically, from after dinner to the time you go to bed. The really juicy questions, like “Should I move out” skyrocket at around 11pm.
Something I love doing is Googling bodily symptoms online, on Reddit, then spending 35 minutes “doom-scrolling”, then 15 minutes sort of fidgeting, and then 10 assuring myself that “I don’t have bad blood circulation or Tennis Elbow” and the next 2 days trying to convince myself of it.
According to this study, 89% of Americans do the same thing more or less, before going to their doctor.
It should also be noted that 89% of doctors are also fools. No citation needed here.
Break. Let’s take a break. Stand up and stretch. Pee in your driveway. What are we supposed to be doing when we’re typing? Staring at far-away objects every 7 minutes? Go do that.
Break time is over. Stop staring out the window, you freak.
Part III: Questions
Questions are the vital organs of an essay. They’ve been withheld until here because I got so distracted in describing the context.
But we’re here now. So let’s dig.
Q1: Why am I such a whore for advice?
Good question. Here are my answers, in case you’re curious.
- Because there are so many layers of the self and it’s hard to know which one to follow. The experiencer? Observer? Spectator? Observer of the observers?
- Because I have a body.
- Because bodies do funny things.
- Because my body doesn’t comply to the expectations of my mind, and that freaks me out.
- Because I have a brain.
- Because, as Hugh Prather wrote, I often find myself looking for the ‘right’ decision rather than wondering, “what do I feel like doing?”
- Because I crave harmony.
- Because I put others’ feelings before my own (I’m just such an empath).
- Because I am open to influence (because I am a Pisces with a Libra moon?)
- Because how do you know which feelings to act on, and which to move through?
- Because love ends.
- Because it’s easier to ask someone how to navigate your cave than to blunder around in the dark with your weak little headlamp, bumping into walls, awakening goblins who want to stick you like a pig.
Whichever piece of advice I’m looking for, the catalyst is the same: something is hidden inside me: a diagnosis, an emotion, a trauma, a preference, a piece of myself I’d neglected at some point, a love forgotten. By consuming information (or consuming weed), I hope that it will be unearthed.
Question 2: How does gobbling down this online counsel effect the process of discovering, and creating, our own truths?
Another good question. I don’t know.
One place to start is to differentiate between the reasons you, or I, am looking for advice on our experience.
Why am I looking in the first place.
Am I hoping to discover information? Or am I looking to validate what I’ve already found? While this sounds rhetorical, it’s an earnest question.
Encountering the Self
Sometimes, you plunge into your cave hoping to encounter yourself. Parts of yourself that have been hidden, or, Freudianly, repressed.
It is like looking for a wild animal. When I’m bushwhacking through all the comments on Reddit, I’m looking for a track in the snow, a sign, that might lead me somewhere. I follow it. Bushwack through troll comments and in-cells. I’m hoping to make eye contact with the animal: with the albino elk who wants to fight; the brown rabbit who wants to run; the leatherback turtle who wants to lie still in the creek; the patient scavenger who above all else, craves peace.
But the harder I look outward for the animals of myself, the farther into the dark woods they retreat. Rather than walking gently, quietly, lovingly, to places where the animal drinks, sleeps, eats, walks, hunting online for advice is like stomping around the woods, yelling for him.
This ‘bares’ the question: What happens when I’ve seen the elusive creature? Is that enough to follow him, or at least share what I’ve found?
Usually it isn’t.
Validating your encounter with the self
Sometimes you have an experience that no one around you believes, and that you yourself do not fully trust. It’s nearly impossible to photograph, like a snow leopard on the Russian Taiga. Maybe you are a kid and discuss your dinner, mentally, with a rabbit in the yard. Maybe you see the beach-side sunrise turn deep red, all of the sudden, when you ask for a sign from God (as Rick Rubin did). Maybe your gut drops when your partner say that he loves you.
In this short article, Forbes writer Ian Altman discusses the difference between looking for advice and validation. Along with a toxic level of advertisements blocking 70% of the screen, there is some good stuff in there on seeking validation of a risky, or unpopular decision. The risk is rejection. Or making a ‘wrong’ decision.
Usually the messaging we get around making decisions, taking leaps, falls into the David Goggins and Jocko Willink camp, with some jacked dude telling you to “Just fucking go for it you pussy!” Or a very nuanced, stoic, Ryan Holliday sort of incrimental work (that also involves buying his books). I am very jaded and getting off topic here.
The point is that when you notice you’re looking for validation, the next move is often to repress it. Or overcome it. Summon your strength, your willpower, your discipline, and climb over the wall.
What helps me is just noticing when I’m looking for validation — not yelling at myself for it, or slut-shaming myself. Approaching it, as Pema Chodron details in her book, “The Wisdom of No Escape,” with curiosity and love.
What type of validation am I seeking? Whose rejection am I afraid of? And what can this tell me about my experience?
Question 3: How can the awareness of this illuminate more helpful navigational strategies?
God, another good question.
When approaching this from a place of curiosity, something about the whole process changes. No longer are we crashing through the bush looking for an animal that may or may not exist. We’re not yelling at ourselves for our own self-doubt, or own insecurity about looking for advice.
Instead, I also begin to notice details of this process. Which pieces of advice do I gobble down? Which pieces give me a jolt of anxiety when I read? What am I reading that I’m like, fuck this?
Based on the feelings associated with those questions, I know a little bit more about what I really think. I really want reassured that it’s possible to hike the Colorado Trail with a 60L backpack. That’s what I want to do. When I read UltraLiteLarry saying that “it is humanely impossible to hike the CT without a 45L or smaller pack,” I think to myself, Fuck you, snob, and read on.
This is something that takes a good deal of breathing, of relaxing, to do. It’s hard for me. But when I do find myself noticing, noticing and applying compassion, I usually get off the forum pretty quickly.
Not because it’s bad for me. Not because I’m guilty or afraid.
But because I don’t want to be there. Because I feel like I read something that informs me a little bit. And when I do, no matter if I read 78 comments or 2, I return to my experience right where I started — on the edge of my comfort zone, on the cliff of the unknown, waiting to dive down into the cave.
Part III: What Now
How does all this factor into the art, the act, of internal cave-diving? Again. I don’t really know. I’m figuring it out. But it helps to be aware of it, and to be aware of the fact that your cave is not my cave.
Some final thoughts: We do not need the same tools. We cannot use the same maps. We can glean tips from each other about how to navigate caves in general, but even that is suspect to intense variation.
Also, note to self: Just stop reading Reddit threads on bodily symptoms and mental health conditions. I feel terrible and terrified when I do it.
I also asked around for advice on this, unironically, and would like to share a few things I found. I literally Googled “how to end a Medium article.” One of the first suggestions is to use subheadings, along with the classic, “Tell you what I said and how it’s going to help your life.”
Disclaimer: I don’t know if it will.
Now is when I share advice with you about getting advised not to look for advice by people giving advice to conclude this way-too-long essay
Dr. Jimmy White has some good advice about asking for advice. Recorded in an interview, he offers the following.
“Taking advice from people about achievability of things outside of their experience can be the kiss of death to living your dreams.”
Jimmy White is a certified bad-ass, and was the expedition leader on a National Geographic trip to Antarctica I was lucky enough to sneak onto, in 2019.
When we embarked from Ushuaia, Argentina down the Drake Passage to the Antarctica Penninsula, we got some rough seas. During that time, a lot of people got sea-sick — including him. Talking later with him and my aunt, who works with him, he talked about how much he loves the sea and its creatures. And how it makes him so damn sick every time he’s on it.
Which reminds me of something else he said in that interview, another Churchillian bomb. “The great fulfillment in adventure,” he says, “is not exploration without fear; it’s exploration whilst harnessing it.”
Concluding Call to Action
So go down in there. Yeah — you there. I know it’s dark. And the ground is made of leeches. And the leeches are made of mayonnaise. Bring your tools, your lights. Learn to read a compass, but make your own map.
I want to have faith in what Joseph Campbell said. This was the advice when I first applied to MFA programs in Creative Writing, a field, my poetry professor reminded me, is notoriously easy to get solid, stable, well-paying, meaningful jobs in.
“Follow your bliss, and the universe will open doors for you where before there were only walls.”
