Advisory Bullshit
It occurred to me again today how many people there are trying to tell us how to live our lives. Doctor Phil. The Dali Lama. Every inexperienced academic on the planet. The Federal Government. Oprah Winfrey. Fox News. John McCain. (okay, so those last two are telling us the same things) Cereal boxes. New age self-improvement books. Newspaper columns. Talk shows. Organized (and unorganized) religions. The Marketing Machine. Bloggers. The media in general. The “style” section in particular. Movies stars. Athletes. Everybody.
News flash. These people are all wrong.
They all have an ax to grind. They all want to look extra smart, or want some slice of your money, or want to exercise control over you, or just want to convince you that their way is the one true way. All of them are mouthing generalities which have nothing to do with you in particular and very little to do with human beings in general. They all want you to do things that are to their advantage and don’t even bother taking you into consideration.
You are the only one like you that there is. That uniqueness is much more than a platitude. The complexity and fine structure that makes up an individual human being is a truly awesome thing to behold, and is utterly impossible to fully comprehend. The best that the platitudes, old wives tales, and conventional “wisdoms” can do is try to play games with your mind for the advantage of the utterer. Pay them little mind.
There is a nugget of “truth” in all of them, if you are the “average” person. Of course, no one is average and there are no easy answers. If you’d like, have a look at what people have to say. If you have enough grains of salt, there is probably something to take away from everything anybody ever says. But that something is probably too general and too small to be of any real value for the specific you.
It should also be noted that looking endlessly at every platitude that comes into your field of vision is probably not a good thing. If you are looking for and at these things, you are probably trying to learn and improve yourself, which is an excellent objective. But the best that platitudes can do is set you to thinking about someone else’s truth and how it may apply to you, if at all.
The truth is, in order to improve yourself, you have to understand your own fine structure and not someone else’s. You need to study and understand yourself. There will never be time to compare yourself against everything. And even more importantly, you will need to actually do something to improve yourself. Pondering platitudes endlessly is an excellent way to waste the rest of your life. After some reasonable period of reflection, get off your butt and do something. If it’s wrong, learn from it and change what you do next accordingly.
Inaction leads only to more inaction. Only informed action leads to life. So stop reading this, right now, and go out and do something. 
