Can You Please Stop Telling Me To Live My Best Life Please

Thoughts On The Advice Pandemic

The sea: it’s great, so long as you can avoid the sea bishops, telling you how to be the best version of you

I was in the swimming pool yesterday, resting between lengths, and a lady of maybe 75ish was staring at me, or perhaps beyond me. My feeling is that it’s nice to be friendly and open to conversation from unexpected quarters in the pool but there was something about the look on her face that did not put me at ease. It was like the look a person who’d not eaten for three days might wear while staring across a road at a delicious, locked pudding.

“Father?” she said. “Father?”

I heard crows and maybe a raven or two in the lady’s accent, which was hard to place. German? Maybe not. But definitely somewhere with no shortage of cured meat and turreted buildings teetering over limestone crags. I turned around, expecting to see one of South West England’s most ancient living men and witness an unlikely, emotional poolside reunion, but there was nobody there. Facing up to the fact she might be addressing me, I made eye contact and smiled as calmly as I could bring myself to, wondering how I was going to let her down gently and explain the severity of her miscalculation, but what she said next was unexpected.

“Do THIS with your hands,” she said. “Place the fingers very tight TOGETHER. Make sure there is no space. NO SPACE. You will go FASTER. If you do not you are like a boat without a sssssaail.”

Back before I took some lessons and got a little better at swimming, stuff like this happened to me quite regularly. In Yeovil in early 2019 a woman swam over to me and told me she was nurturing fantasies of tying my legs together. Not long before that, an hour or so south west of there, a retired policeman called Brian admitted that he’d been secretly watching me breathing. Because I relocated to the other side of the country halfway through my course of swimming lessons, five years ago, there are plenty of flaws in my front crawl. I don’t balance my breaths between left and right the way I should, I can’t tumble turn and I tend to kick either too much from the knee or not at all. I’m happy, though, move fairly smoothly through the water, and pretty much always feel great when I’m swimming, especially when I reach length 30 or so, and even more so if there are no strangers interrupting to offer me unsolicited advice.

“I think you met a genuine storybook witch,” said Ellie that evening, when I told her about the lady with dessert in her eyes and goth birds in her voice. “Maybe that’s how she always breaks the ice with strangers: by pretending they’re her long lost dad. Let’s face it, though, it’s not exactly anything new, for you, is it.”

I know by now there’s no point in denying that I attract the attentions of eccentric strangers. The last time I did, a man holding a trout, as if summoned by my very rebuttal, instantly chased me along a riverbank asking “Please can you take a photo of me and my fish?” My cousin Fay has a theory that everyone in our family has the words ‘Fuck off’ stencilled in invisible ink on our forehead but empirical evidence suggests that gene somehow sidestepped me. If I do have anything stencilled in the same place, it’s perhaps ‘Please place me in a conversational headlock for a minimum of an hour while I smile politely and quietly die inside’. I can’t help thinking immediately back to the stranger who invited me to a remote barn to look at some records he was selling then showed me his colostomy bag and attempted to recruit me for a hateful political movement, or the stranger who approached me in a pub garden and explained that she could see her previous warrior self in a small puddle of ale, or the stranger who, noticing my bronzed July skin and the paisley headband I was wearing, cornered me in the post office and asked me if I was a “Red Indian”. Whatever particular quality my face has that triggers such incidents, it’s been extremely useful for somebody who makes his living by writing, but often I also yearn for a quiet day, solely in my own company, unbothered by, say, a man I’ve never met stopping me in the middle of a walk to take me through the reasons that he’s cut his daughters out of his will.

These days, though, I find myself asking what’s more genuinely antisocial: the previously unknown person who wants to give you an uncomfortably large amount of information about their life, or the one who, unprompted, wants to explain to you what you can do to improve your own? We are living through an advice pandemic and nobody appears to have yet discovered an effective vaccine. In the earliest years of this century, if a publisher wanted to sell a book, they asked the author to put someone’s relative in the title. When that became widely recognised as a cliche, they started adding the word “Girl” instead. These days they just begin it with ‘How To…’. I, for example, have been extremely commercially intransigent by writing a book about 1983 and calling it 1983, rather than How To Be A Human Being In 1983, which is what I would have called it if I’d wanted it to receive some proper hype and get displayed more prominently in bookshops on the tables at the front reserved for books with titles beginning with ‘How To….’. Substack is drowning in writers who, instead of merely writing, specialise in telling people how to write for Substack. The self-help market for writing is saturated with gurus and big promises, which might partly account for the lack of success of my own How To Write course, where I do nothing except tell you to fuck off for 20 years, read a shitload of books and write in whatever the hell way you want to.

The advice pandemic has been in progress for several years now. You might be forgiven for thinking that by this point we’d all be sorted and know precisely how to live. Yet the advice keeps flowing, like an artificially sweetened form of slime, from every cultural orifice. In our medieval village brains, which, unlike the software on our devices, cannot update in accordance with technology’s relentless forward thrusts, we try and fail to cope with all the reports coming at us from every side about a vast, impossibly complex world permanently on the precipice of collapse. The advice industry preys on that process, offering simplifying solutions. It is a politician: the dangerous kind who tells you that the world is without shades of grey. “Come with me,” it says. “I can simplify all this for you and take away the stress. I have the formula. I am the way forward.” But the formula often turns out to be another route into the centre of the confusion abyss, constructed by the hot tarmac of advice. “I need to get away from apps so I can sleep better,” says someone. “I have just the app for that,” replies the advice industry. “It’s yours for only £2.99 per month.”

Advice can be fabulous and even life-changing, at times. In December 2006 I submitted a manuscript to a man called Tristan Jones and he sent it back to me positively graffitied with advice. Some of it even seemed a bit personally disparaging when I first scanned through it. The advice of Tristan Jones ultimately made me a better writer. But in December 2006 Tristan Jones was working as my editor. He wasn’t just, say, a stranger who stopped me in the market place in my local town while I had a mouthful of brie and cranberry baguette and told me, “Hey, you wanna know what I think, buddy? I think you need to cut the dangling modifiers. Also, try to learn the difference between ‘such as’ and ‘like’, and try to say what you mean in the simplest possible way, even if what you’re saying is quite complicated.” From time to time people I have never met who are not being employed as my editor will get in touch with me on Substack and stridently instruct me to write shorter paragraphs. My feeling about that is they probably have their reasons, but also that they’re mistaking me for someone who is writing for people who want short paragraphs. If I were to offer unsolicited advice to them individually (which I would not, because it’s against my religion) I would say that acting like a one-person bomb squad employed by the state to detonate paragraphs all over the internet can free up anywhere between 11 and 34 hours of extra leisure time per annum. I also cannot help, on these occasions, thinking about all the many many people on Substack, including me, who choose not to treat other people’s newsletters as part of a ‘How To Write Business Prose For A Distracted World’ seminar which they are personally chairing. and how, by not making that choice, we don’t appear to be making anything more unpleasant for anyone.

Some might say I veer too far towards the hands-off approach where offering unsolicited advice is concerned. If a stranger walks out of a shop in front of me and drops one of their possessions without noticing, I will inform them about it. But if I see a stranger’s shoelace is undone, my philosophy is “Maybe they know, and are just about to take their shoes off, and figure the effort of tying one for two extra minutes isn’t worthwhile.” Much like loose banana skins, undone shoelaces are not the cause of as many accidents as the populist hype suggests. The other day I saw a man standing in an area I know well, consulting an Ordnance Survey map. I opted not to stop my car and ask if he needed directions. My reason for this was that he was holding a map, which is generally a thing where directions can be found in great quantities. Often, these situations are a social judgement call, based on carefully calculated levels of familiarity and potential fallout. If you’re a friend of mine who’s left the house wearing trousers that don’t go with the rest of his outfit, I don’t see any point in bringing it up. If you’re a friend of mine who’s left the house wearing no trousers at all, I might gently ask if you are ok. If you’re a stranger who’s done the same thing, I’ll run as far away from you as is humanly possible.

In my experience, it is the people who seem most adamant that they know the correct way to live, and are most keen to instruct others to live in the same way that they do, who are often the most frighteningly unforgiving and controlling to be around. I suppose that’s one thing I have learned in a life that has mostly taught me that I know nothing. Another is that the illusion that much of the advice industry is based around - that there is a plateau where everything is sorted and nice forever - is nothing more than that: an illusion. If you ask me for some advice, I might give it, but with the proviso that I’m just muddling through and my good advice will not necessarily be your good advice. If you’d said to me in 2022, for example, “Tom, which tortilla chips would you recommend that I purchase to go with a hot salsa dip?”, I would recommend you purchased the budget tortilla chips from Co-op, but that would be based on the fact I was regularly shopping at Co-op at that point, and that I personally dislike Doritos, which were the only other option on offer in that establishment. At no point, after walking along a street and seeing a family I’d never met eating Doritos in the comfort of their own home, would I smash that family’s dining room window and tell them their life philosophy was incorrect. Similarly, I’m not going to use this Substack page to offer you ten bullet points on how to be the writer you should be. If I did, it would end up being far too tailored to writing like me, which would be bad advice, since the person you should be writing like is yourself.

About six years ago, in the same spot in the same pool where the old lady with between 32 and 48 corvids in her voice pretended to mistake me for her father then gave me some unsolicited advice on how to improve my front crawl, another female stranger, less than half her age, turned to me and said, “You know what? Fuck this. I’m getting out.” Overall, I preferred the earlier of the two incidents. Some might say it was a little unhinged: the woman and I had never met or spoken to each other before and it might be claimed I didn’t need to know she was getting out of the pool. But I enjoyed the implication of her outburst: that she and I were bound by a mutual hardship, this terrible thing called “swimming”, and that she was taking a much-needed stand against it. Also, she wasn’t recommending that I got out of the pool with her, merely informing me that was what she was doing, and implying that I could follow her if I wished. It improved my day. This was in contrast to yesterday’s incident, which, though I’m going to choose to see it as well-intentioned, made me enjoy swimming far less than I had been up to that point. I did actually try the hand advice offered, but it didn’t suit me, make me more aquatically dynamic or a happier person. It just made me stressed, which, a few minutes later, gave me cramp, which prompted me to cut my swim short. I’m not going to the pool today. I’m going to the sea. Yes, it has its drawbacks: it’s too big to do lengths in, I got stung on the nose by a jellyfish there on Wednesday, and there’s sewage in quite a bit of it nowadays. But there’s no entry fee and it reliably makes me feel wonderful every time I’m in it. I’ll stretch out and do some gentle half-schooled crawl, unhurried by other swimmers, freeing my mind of unwanted clutter. After a while, if the sun’s out, I’ll swim out a little further and let myself starfish on the surface. As I do, I will empty my mind and let it fill with nothing but the light ambient noise around me: the shingle moving beneath the waves, the hum of the motor on a distant boat, and the gentle, reliably soothing sound of nobody trying to offer anybody any advice.

It’s now less than six weeks until my new novel comes out. You can pre-order it here, with free worldwide delivery.

My other recent previous books are Villager, Notebook, Ring The Hill, Help The Witch and 21st-Century Yokel.