Why I don’t take advice from social media
Social media this, Instagram that, you would swear my screen time is five minutes. But I would not know all this if it were not for experience. When you take on a different view, you tend to see the detrimental effects of your actions.
People on social media have a lot of interesting things to say.
I guess I am one of them, seeing as I am writing this article. But I don’t wake up and tell people what to do. What I do is an art; I show you sides of a building, and you decide whether you want to enter through the door or the window.
I do not decide for you or try to influence you into making a decision. Now on social media, we see a lot of people (who are also here for the first time) telling others how to live their lives. There’s a lot of advice on social media for anything and EVERYTHING. Anything under the sun, someone has given advice on. But after a while, I learnt that I should take everything with a grain of salt.
People speak based on their views
We give advice based on our experiences in life. We are not always unbiased; we lean on to certain ideas. If you really look at the why of what people say, it is because of some past encounter. Not because they are rational or reasonable, though that may not always be the case. Some people’s beliefs stem from bitterness, some stem from a place of hurt. This especially applies to giving advice about relationships.
People’s advice is not catered to your situation
When people give advice, it is based on who they met and what happened to them, not based on your specific situation. The same goes for people who give career advice, life coaching, etc, they cater to what they have seen. Not your circumstances, we previously wrote an article about how to start a business with just R350, and not every reader even has that capital or the clientele. When people tell you to quit your job or school, they do not tell you about everything that happened in their background, the network they had and maybe the inheritance.
It is like being told to take a certain concussion for weight gain or weight loss, but you are lactose intolerant, for example, so that concussion won’t work on you as it did on the other person. And that’s life advice, not one size fits all. We really have to discern what we choose to listen to, for whose benefit it is, and why we should follow it. Be curious.
People don’t believe what they say
I could be writing this quite lengthy article, then after this, go on social media to listen to a person talk about “how to make it in life”, and most of what they are saying involves manipulating. My point is, I could be saying all this without truly even believing in it. And that is what happens on social media a lot of the time, people do not always speak because they believe what they are saying. They may speak because it will sell or generate a lot of views and engagement. My title is “Why I don’t take advice from social media”, which is kind of more bold than just saying “why I don’t take some advice from social media”. Social media is now about reaction, triggering something within you, be it excitement or sadness. So people do not tell you that you will have to work hard to make it to where they are. They tell you that ALL you need is to be audacious. It sells, it sounds good, radical maybe.
Not everyone is a professional
Not everyone on social media is an expert in the thing they claim to be an expert in. Social media is a blend of people who claim to be experts and those who actually are. People give medical advice that, in some cases, is contrary to medical doctors or research. But when a video shows popularity, we are drawn to it, and we do not discern or check credentials. We easily trust the source. And now with AI content, the lines between what is real and what is not are distorted.
Social Media Ruined My Relationship
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The takeaway
People have good things to say and some “interesting” but questionable things too. And we who are sponges and consume a lot of “information”. We should be careful what we absorb and apply to life. And we should evaluate whether certain advice is applicable to our own lives. We should not be gullible and fall victim to bad medical advice. We should not be mindless consumers of every piece of content put out on the internet, but rather question it and think about it in-depth, even if our current world does not allow it (because everything is fast-paced).