I’ll go first: “You have to have children when you’re young,” told to me when I was in my late 20s, with no desire to ever have kids, and no means to support them, by someone divorced multiple times with at least one adult child who does not speak to them.
Also: Responding to “How do I deal with this problem?” questions with “Oh, don’t worry about it, it’s enough that you’re even thinking about it!”
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Don’t ever quit.
Screw that. Quitting is healthy, quitting is good. Nothing worse than digging yourself deeper and deeper based on sunk cost fallacy.
“Don’t be a quitter” is like saying “Fuck your boundaries. Stay in toxic situations no matter how bad they get.”
If I’m sick of something, I don’t quit, I change direction.
“Don’t be a quitter” is something that makes sense if you’re in the middle of a board game or the likes. It definitely shouldn’t be applied to big things like jobs or relationships.
Absolutely! Strategic quitting is an option that people don’t use enough. Definitely improved my quality of life!
as everything this has contexts in which is valuable and contests in which it’s not
don’t quit because you’re demoralised. don’t quit because you’re tired. don’t quit because it’s hard.
if your first natural response to adversities is flying instead of fighting, it’s telling you to fight, because you are likely the only person losing when flying.
it’s not about never change your mind. never critically think what’s the situation and if it’s still worth it.
or check up with yourself and see if that’s still what you want.
after all leaving a situation you don’t want anymore, it’s not quitting, it’s moving on
it seems just semantics, it’s about knowing yourself and being honest with yourself.
nothing is black or white
You dont have to keep going if you are tired and demoralized either. You dont owe pain and suffering and missed opportunities to your past self. You can quit any time you want for any reason or no reason at all, just be prepared to accept the consequences.
They told me to not quit. So I’m still a crack addict.
“Just be happy” to a depressed person
Oh wow, jeez, thanks, why didn’t I think of that earlier!
Ah yes, the good ol’ “Just get over it” technique that is supposed to work for any mental health condition.
The problem is that a version of this advice can be very helpful. As someone who has suffered from ongoing mental health issues and also work in an industry where I regularly support people with mental health issues, one piece of advice I often give is to identify what traumas are you unnecessarily holding on to, which are contributing to your depression/anxiety etc.
When you can let go of some of the more mundane stresses in your life, you have more energy to tackle the real issues you’re facing. Of course this is much easier said than done and has to be used as part of a more wholeistic approach, but sometimes the advice to just learn to let it go is very good advice.
Unfortunately, many people don’t understand that intricacy and so just repeat the surface level comment which is far from helpful. And this in turn also leads to a push back in the other direction where people who could genuinely benefit from letting go of some of their stress refuse to do so because they have spent so long being told that’s all there is to it.
That’s fascinating. Do you have suggestions for any resources that talk about how to do this in a healthy way?
There’s heaps of psychology research into therapeutic approaches and all that stuff out there if you’re willing to essentially do a degree on the topic, but personally I like to keep things as simple as possible so anyone can start applying it straight away.
I usually start with the picture story book The Huge Bag of Worries by Virginia Ironside (there’s a read along of it on youtube) to frame the conversation. It helps to set up the idea that the “worries” are real and are having an effect on the individual. Also that many people struggle to know how to deal with them and end up giving bad advice, often because they are carrying their own bag of worries. I also at this point remind them that we are unlikely to get rid off all the problems, eg I can’t cure your depression or rebuild your brain to make it neuro-typical, but we can make it so they are the only things in your bag making it a lot easier to carry.
Then I’ll talk about a Catastrophe Scale. This is where we take a worry and rank it on a scale out of 10 of how bad is it really. 1 is a minor problem that will go away on it’s own, and 10 is an extreme issue that will have a permanent impact on your life. Like in the book, many problems stop being an issue once you realize they are only a 1 or 2 on the scale. This is the “just get over it” point. Other’s need some attention but can easily be solved or passed on to someone else in your support network to handle, but once you’ve spent that small amount of energy, it’s gone. This is the where we see the value of another piece of despised advice, “stop worrying and just do it” or “have you tried going for a walk outside today”. Once again, often spouted advice by people who think of it as the only thing needed without understanding how it fits into a complete treatment plan.
Finally that just leaves the real problems, the ones that are less easy to deal with. But without having to carry the weight of the whole bag of worries, we now have a capacity to take those worries to therapy or a doctor to medicate etc, and just generally do the more difficult and complex work that’s needed.
Thanks!
Similar to this: telling someone with ADHD “stop letting yourself get distracted”
Or to someone with anxiety:
“Just don’t be anxious!”
🫠…
Someone told me that if I wanted to be a history teacher I should get a degree in special Ed to “make myself more marketable.” It took 14 years to get out of special education and land a job teaching history
14 years is a long time. Hope you’re having a better time now.
Teaching as a profession sucks ass in general right now… but at least a lot of the special educator-specific bullshit is not my problem anymore. But thank you.
Coincidentally, I know someone who recently applied for a regular teacher’s assistant role and when they got to the interview the hiring director didn’t even ask questions about that position; instead they interviewed for a special ed job and then only offered that. It was a total bait & switch to try and fill a role nobody was applying for.
I got the same thing said to me but to go into math instead. I never listened to them. Now I’m looking for jobs and there’s a ton of openings for history jobs and I tend to feel a little smug about it.
“There are people worse off than you”
Thanks, that totally solves my problem.
I always tell them “Following that logic, there’s only one person in the world that can complain. But that dude really got it bad.”
My counter is always, “and there are people better off than you, so stop being happy.”
My dad threw a party to celebrate when I graduated university with a degree in Computer Science.
At the party, my dad’s friend took me aside and said “My nephew just got a degree in electrical engineering. Now that’s an up and coming field, you should get a degree in that.”
Like, alright buddy. Hopefully that career pays well enough for another four years of student debt. I’m still kinda in shock at how dumb of a thing to say that was.
Ah yes the brand new exciting world of electricity. Rumor on the street is they’ve got this fancy new device called a tellyfone that uses this electricity. You can talk to anyone in the world!
In another 10 years, electricity will rule the world - mark my words!
Me: having a hard time mentally and emotionally Someone: “You need to pray to God to make your troubles go away.”
“Nothing happens in god’s world by mistake.” “God never gives you more than you can handle.” Etc etc.
When 1 in 6 women has been sexually assaulted in their lives (and many men and NB folks), that’s a really fucked up thing to say. You never know what someone’s been through, and I’ve personally been through a lot of awful things. I guess it helps some people to tell themselves this kind of shit, but it is impossible to me to think of any kind of meaning that would make being a victim of violent crime “positive” or “worth it” or “a learning experience” blah blah blah. I think the term for that is “toxic positivity.”
So either “everything happens for a reason” is utter bullshit, or god is a sadistic fucking asshole.
Am I supposed to upvote this because it’s awful advice or downvote it because it’s depressing advice?
It seems like this person either had success with their advice or had nothing to say, but felt the need to say something.
My favorite advice for clinical depression is “just snap out of it.”
That since I was pregnant it was time to let my career go.
My career is critical to my family’s ability to live a middle class life (and it’s critical to my sanity and happiness, but the person who gave me this “advice“ wasn’t really one for acknowledging or valuing mental health).
That’s so rude. People make such wild assumptions about other people’s lives.
The usual acne related ones, like washing my face more or using tooth paste on my spots. Turns out clearasil won’t fix your hormones.
Use olive oil instead of sun screen because it works better than SPF and isn’t full of chemicals.
When taking a taxi on a short stop over in Dubai, the taxi driver told me not to have blue hair (which I had) or no man will ever want me, while my then boyfriend was also sitting in the taxi, masquerading as my husband (we were wearing rings and just letting people assume we were married, which everyone did. Including the taxi driver!)
Work related: don’t make my code too “complicated” or my one coworker can’t understand it (read: my coworker doesn’t know what async means, and instead of him learning, I’m just not ever meant to do anything async… When processing huge amounts of data… Also, error handling is too hard, don’t do that either) yes, I will forever be salty about this. He deleted weeks worth of work while I had covid because he didn’t even try to understand it - his reasoning being “it doesn’t work anyway, so there’s no point in understanding or learning what I’m doing”
Where do you work that allows someone to just delete someone else’s work all willy-nilly? If someone did that to my code I’d be PISSED.
Someone did that to my whole project. I had catefully migrated all the source control to a new and improved system. Out boss decided which project went into which organization.
Some idiot went and intentionally deleted a project I was meant to do maintenance because he had decided all by himself that it wasn’t meant to be there.
I had to do a long train ride to the idiot’s office for a training and when he told me what he did (proudly!) I gave him the sort of verbal bollocking I have never done before or since.
To the point where he contacted our boss to complain. I got a call from my boss to excuse himself on behalf of the idiot.
^a
Del
^s
Fixed your code :D
ggdG:wq
I like reading vim commands as if they were spoken. “Good game daddy girl colon wanna quit” (idk)
D:
A game changer I had for acne as a teen was putting a new towel on my pillow every night. My pillow was likely riddled with Cutibacterium acnes from sleeping with acne.
It helped another friend with an acne problem as well.
Mind you that bacteria isn’t always the cause of acne, but it’s worth trying this trick for any people out there going through it.
That would have been actually useful advice! I actually did start doing that a couple of years ago, and it really did help. It didn’t clear it up, but the acne hasn’t been quite as aggressive since. I also do other things now too, so I’m in a pretty good place for my face skin at last lol
“Just have one or two and then stop” when telling a friend I’m an alcoholic. Well shit, thanks! That never even crossed my mind!
Thanks, I’m cured!
Which would inevitably be followed by “Just one more can’t hurt!”…
I hope you’re doing better now.
That is absolutely what follows. I am doing MUCH better, I’ve had 2.5 years sober in the last 3 years because I thought I was “cured” and started “moderating” last summer. The stop drinking subreddit was amazing insight and help. It’s on lemmy but the only posts are the daily checkin. I should start being more active on it to boost it.
It’s more a question of how many times it crosses my mind.
“sleep when the baby sleeps”
Yeah because there’s absolutely nothing that needs to be done once I finally get my daughter down. No washing and sterilising, for prep for us or for her, general chores around the house which you can never do effectively one handed. And fuck me if I wanted to try and relax and have an actual evening after they’re down too.
“Sleeping like a baby” had also never seemed like such a juxtaposition!
I feel like the phrase “sleeping like a baby” was not created by someone who was a primary caretaker for a baby.
Exactly, unless they actually meant it to mean “for no more than 30 minutes then wake up crying inconsolably because I’ve shit myself.”
Then they hit the nail on the head and people have just misconstrued it!
Here’s some more unhelpful advice: Hang in there, it gets easier! (for real though)
Also, like, adult humans don’t do so good if they only get to sleep for an hour or two at a time. I don’t have kids but I have a puppy and my mental health improved 10x when he stopped waking up every night because he needed to pee. Just going from two 4-hour blocks of sleep to one 8-hour block.
Then he hit puppy adolescence and had a massive sleep regression and I was getting an hour or two of sleep at a time between SCREAMING PUPPY INTERLUDES and promptly lost my fucking mind. I gave up on crating him because I needed the sleep.
“Everything happens for a reason”
- technically correct, completely unhelpful.
“God doesn’t give you more than you can handle”
- Fuck. Off.
My mother once told us to get “a male realtor; the woman realtors don’t care as much because they’re just doing it as a hobby - the men are doing it as their full time job.”
She’s a real gem.
Yeah… In this day and age where people struggle financially I’m sure women just do it as a hobby… 🙄
Just be yourself.
Oh yeah ok. Thanks. That fixes everything.
Lost out on a good job opportunity with this one. I was going to do some interview prep and someone just told me to, “be yourself, they just want to get to know you.” Yeah bullshit… didn’t get that gig and did interview prep for a different opportunity. It went incredibly well the second time around.
As long-term career advice, I think this is helpful In finding something that doesn’t drag you down. If you can’t be yourself at work it’s going to be far more taxing.
But I absolutely understand this is a luxury to be able to be in that position of being choosy about your employer.
You’ll be far happier in an environment that enjoys you for being you, but you’ll find a job quicker by saying what they want to hear
I envy the people who can be themselves at work without losing their job the same day. But only a bit, because it looks incredibly boring.
Find a trade. If you’re good at what you do, it really doesn’t matter how wierd or fucked up you are. You can even get in full-on arguments with your boss that get forgotten about once everyone calms down.
As if you are not already yourself!
I like to think what people really mean when they say that is “be your best self”, but that’s still not very helpful.
What is the most unhelpful advice you have received?
- "They’re your family so you have to maintain a relationship with them’
- “man up”
- attend church
The first one is the worst. My dad says this to me all the time, well, why is it that I have to do all the work, they never try to maintain a relationship with me. Also, fuck them, they are terrible people, maybe I don’t want to maintain a relationship with toxic shitty people even if they are family.
“Get into the housing market while you can.”
My brother, mid 2005.
oof.
Yep. Bought a residence for $500k and two years later it was worth $330K.
How much is it worth now?
Sold it 5 years ago for somewhere in the 700s. So ultimately it turned out okay. But there was an extremely awkward period where I had to move out and would have sold if it wasn’t underwater. I wound up becoming a landlord for several years which I wouldn’t have chosen and felt pretty scummy but it did save me in the long run.
