In defense of the advice column
The Age of Peak Advice | The New Yorker
Advice columns are like iPhone cases, available in endless variety, depending on how stern/leftist/poetic/practical/old you like your advice-giver.
Jamie Fisher takes a dim view of this glut in The New Yorker because of what she sees as their relentless focus on the individual as the unit of change:
[Advice columns are] often accused of conflating systemic problems with matters of personal responsibility...What can we do to get you happy within the system?...They are society writ small, and their ambitions are small, too.
I sympathize. I don’t imagine Ask A Manager’s responses to my work complaints would lament the institution of work as a whole or suggest starting a union. And yes, in some ways, this the ultimate neoliberal answer to individual pain -- looking for connection by publicizing our dirtiest secrets to strangers to drive clicks for venture-backed magazines and their subscription paywalls so our favorite advice columnist of choice (depending on our gender, political orientation, etc) can share some words on how to change your “outlook” and thereby stall the revolution for another day.
But Fisher never really addresses the demand side: why are there so many advice columns in the first place? What “need” are they fulfilling? What do they reveal about the anxieties of our time?
Although the questions seem superficially diverse (and if they weren’t different, what would fuel an weekly advice column?), after a while, they read as the same question, over and over again: how do I cope with isolation, lack of meaning, and uncertainty?
The advice column might be the most neoliberal solution imaginable (aside from therapy apps) to a widespread crisis of community and chronic uncertainty, as Fisher suggests, but it’s also responding to a real need.
They are one of the few public forums left that facilitate conversations that otherwise might never happen at all. They are one of the rare places in which two strangers engage in an otherwise atomized world. So I don’t want to write the whole genre off.
There is something magical, essential, about saying something out loud, and of someone else engaging with that vulnerability. That honesty, that trust, that shared relationship feels essential to me to latch on and change as a basis of building commonality and solidarity. As Melissa Febos puts it:
When we feel alone in our experience, many of us begin to feel responsible for it, and then ashamed of it. This isolation is fundamental to the perpetuation of every kind of oppression. The catalyst of most social movements has been a practice of speaking aloud the experiences of oppression to those who share them, giving language to the mechanisms of subjugation and smashing the illusion of their uniqueness to the individual.
Fisher is right that many advice columns reflect the smallness of our visions -- our inability to imagine otherwise -- but that is precisely why the form needs to be reclaimed to do so much more.
After all, isn’t advice the microcosm of our politics? How we diagnose an issue -- to what degree it is the fault of an individual or structural issues -- and what we imagine as a ‘feasible’ response reflect what we imagine is right, just, and possible.
In fact, every politician should be required to have their own advice column, forced to articulate how they would explain and propose acting in real life situations. After all, MLK used to write one, called “Advice for Living” for two years in Ebony!
Readers asked him whether playing rock and roll for a living was a sin, whether birth control was immoral, how he felt about nuclear weapons, and whether to fight in the army of a racist country. Installments poignantly aligned the mundane with the spiritual.
What Fisher misses is that it’s never really about the solution. After all, as Kristin Dombek of n+1 writes, the “impossibility of advice” hovers over every advice column.
I don’t think that’s a fault of the genre but a feature -- it shows the commonality of struggles across people and the impossibility of individuals navigating broken systems by themselves.
The answer is less important than the act of reaching out. The point isn’t to give the right advice, but to give advice. Its value comes from another person recognizing (though not necessarily agreeing with) that pain and engaging as best they can. As Heather Havrilesky of Ask Polly puts it:
But I do know for certain that when I reach out as far as I can to another person, using my words—my awkward, angry, uplifting, uncertain, joyful, clumsy words (half of which are still “fuck”)—some kind of magic happens. There is magic that comes from reaching out. I don’t believe in many things, but I believe in that, with all of my heart.
We need more advice columns, not fewer: not to serve as a stopgap solution for community or authority, but as practice for all of us in asking these questions and answering them, for ourselves, for our friends, for strangers.
I want advice columns that are urgently sympathetic to the individual while acknowledging the society they live in. Ones that are like the deliriously good chat that turns an acquaintance into a friend, or one with an impossibly cool stranger, may be an older sibling’s friend, whose world-weary tone that implies the year separating the two of you will give you the effortless maturity they possess. I’d love an advice column from a five year old for other five year olds (who would be a better authority on toddler social dynamics?!). I want an advice column where the writer solicits advice from readers every week.
The closest I got to the perfect advice column in the process of “researching” this piece (i.e. looking for self-help of my own) is Kristin Dombek’s Bank-robbin’ in Brooklyn. I love how it moves between modes -- high theory with the reality of someone having to live this life, personal history with society, in equal parts confession, theory, and manifesto. It walks the lines between an individual’s responsibility and agency within a collective, between affirming and galvanizing. It is a model for how I want to think and engage with others.
More favorites:
n+1’s Help Desk (see here, and here, and here, and here)
The College Hill Independent’s Dear Indy column (see here and here)