Scorched Earth Policy@Scearpo
This isn't even just a boomer problem, this is a universal problem that occurs every time someone gives advice about something they've never done. I've done it, everyone I know has done it at some point, everyone you know has done it, and you've done it to other people too.
Giving advice on something you know nothing about is one of the most satisfying pleasures on earth while simultaneously being one of the most vapid flatulent acts of microharm you could commit. It's the foundation for why YahooAnswers was so popular before those people figured out they could make Reddit accounts and do creative writing all day for baseless life plans applied as errant comments to helpless rubes begging for advice from the vacuous abyss.
Much like how poker players win the WSOP or make a bag off a Vegas side game just to lose everything doing continuous five figure wagers on holes of golf or sports betting, the folly of competence is the delusion that your moderately higher level of expertise translates to some universal tautology of wisdom.
The harm comes into play when some poor bastard takes your stupid advice over drinks at the bar and suddenly develops a half-assed life plan built around the certainty, simplicity, and competence delivered through a tone of voice which could only be generated by the confidence of an ignorant retard.
It's easy to make fun of Dave Ramsay's bald headed frumpy frowned conveyance of genius boomer wisdom, a fantasy that was delusional even during the heyday of young white hustlers doing power washing gigs to fund their SEO optimization service dropship marketing grifts, or the handwash presumptuous assuredness that "learning code" is a magic ticket to a free high-paying job. OR even that "learning code" is some kind of prerequisite you have to pay $10,000 to "pass" instead of being an ongoing skillset that only ever really rewarded full stack developers who were willing to dedicate the rest of their lives to constantly learning languages, tools, and software in an industry that constantly changes faster than any one human can keep up with.
Aside from the obvious compensationary apocalypse of being shouldered out of these industries by Mexicans and Indians today, machines and LLM's tomorrow, the sin of Dave Ramsay's ignorance is a sin all of us have committed, albeit at a smaller scale and in a less monetized fashion. It's easy to mock something so obviously wrong and out of touch, but it's not so elementary to analyze your own life and figure out what other stupid fucking advice that may have passed through your filters.
Advice is tricky because most people process it as a conveyance of information, rather than what it truly is: An alignment signal from a source of existence you'd like to resemble.
When people write guides or assemble instructions on how to do something properly, they never reached that point through the mechanisms they're delivering to you. Sure you can follow a step-by-step on how to perform a task or execute a function, but success is an immaterial vibrant state of being which demands the sacrifice of risk, uncertainty, and the right amount of failure preceding it.
Too little failure and you're likely just setting up a meaningless goalpost within a range of mediocrity.
Too much failure and you're just demoralizing yourself at something you're genuinely not going to get better at.
Most of the time people are asking for advice, it's either to solve a problem or elevate their own existence. Something vaguely aspirational like becoming rich when you don't have the upbringing or social structures to enable that for you isn't something you can follow a simple walkthrough to reach. If it was, everyone would do it.
Reaching success at anything is a naturalistic process of intuition and instinct, a knack for something particular that gets fueled by consistently dedicating enough energy towards it. If you aren't in love with the process, you're not going to get the outcome. Making money is a personal process for everyone who does it.
Just like having a winning strategy at the casino or finding a niche in business, the only place you can look for money is where you find it. And once you find your place where your money was waiting for you, you sure as shit shouldn't be trying to tell people how to get there unless you're willing to just give them some of your money, because that pathway doesn't exist for them.
Giving advice when you're a loser who isn't any better off than the person you're giving it to is just a coping mechanism, a form of projection where you're trying to feel better about yourself by farming a brief fantasy of your own personal superiority in exchange for deluding yourself that you "helped" someone instead of causing them harm by convincing them to waste their time.
Giving advice from a place of success is even worse sometimes because very few people truly understand the DNA of why they were successful and where it came from. Unless you want to cheapen the definition of success as being some basic benchmark you were able to achieve in a no-stakes effort that thousands of other people can figure out, then actual success is something that requires a sense of rhythm, timing, and sheer fortunate luck that can't just copied by some wordcel who thinks they can self-help book their way into being anything they want.
Even if you're the right combination of autistic, eloquent, and meticulous to be able to deconstruct actual meaningful regimens for others to follow, you're doomed to be drowned out by a market of loud retarded gurus who have an equal chance at steering your cattle into their own pens to bring them to slaughter.
The best advice isn't advice that feels good. It's not even some euphoric tough love kick in the nuts that makes you feel "Wow I really needed to hear that." That itself is its own form of delusion, ask any drug addict how many wake up calls and stirring motivational interventions they've gotten from close friends before they go back to being sucked into the repetition of raping themselves with a glass bottle or another night wasted away smoking dogshit out of a PVC pipe.
The best advice isn't even advice, it's support. It's the exertion of time, energy, money, and focus from someone who loves you because they love you enough to worsen their life in exchange for elevating yours. And the kind of help that actually helps you is the kind of help you hate receiving. It's a humiliating process that, if performed successfully, often makes the person being helped resent the person that helped them.
That is the alchemy of support, it fundamentally demands something for something and the contract of the human condition has assigned that burden to your parents. If they failed you, then sorry, you got a shit deal and you have to play the cards in your hand.
Ironically, actually good advice from someone who knows what they're talking about and delivers it in a way that can be meaningfully achieved to the person who needs it is itself sometimes harmful as well. Sometimes people have to learn things the wrong way in order to naturally develop the context of consequences to ensure they can actually do it the right way. Any student of an actually viable martial art will tell you that they can learn in class and do the drills all day, but the most learning that actually happens comes from sparring on the mats.
There is no substitute for just trying consistently until you figure out what works, and destiny cements itself in your tendency towards what you naturally seem to want to do the most. You're like a big fucking tugboat that's headed down a certain path and you really only get so much leeway on how much you get to change your direction. The more change you want from your fate, the exponentially harder you have to spin that captain's wheel and it'll never be as much as you'd want it to be.
Learn to dismiss errant advice, especially if it's something you never asked for from some stupid asshole who you wouldn't never want to become. Apply a basic rule at bare minimum any time you get advice from someone:
Would I ever want to be this person?
Not just, would I ever want to be as smart as this dude giving me academic advice or would I ever want to be as jacked as this dude giving me workout advice. But overall, ask yourself would you want every part of your life to resemble the life of the person giving that advice, even if the advice itself is as simple as how to cook eggs better or what movie's worth watching.
Chances are, you almost never want to become a guy who talks at a fucking camera with a microphone to make his living. Performance is a form of prostitution and you never escape the disingenuous nature of performing for an audience. The residue of living a life built around streaming, content creation, production, and marketing will create an asterisk that follows you around for the rest of your life.
That includes me and this post. Some guy who writes longposts as a side hobby isn't going to fix your life or make it better. The point of this is to siphon likes and retweets out of you so I can get high off numbers for half an hour and maybe make you entertain or captivate you in exchange for that. Not that most of you were looking to me as some kind of guide for anything, Jesus I hope not.
The two matters where errant advice givers crawl out of the woodwork for the horde of advice seekers desperately looking to get an edge are that of money and pussy.
Everyone wants to make money.
Everyone wants to get pussy.
If the phrasing disgusts you, change it to "finding love" or whatever makes you feel better about it, but those are the two biggest factors that confound and mystify the uninitiated, wealth and women.
The biggest problem in giving advice on the matter, or taking advice on it, is that you're competing against everyone else at all times as a default state. Even if you're rich and happily wedded, with the confidence of knowing you earned both through a well sharpened pedigree of personal skill, you are always psychologically competing with everyone else on these matters forever, it's ingrained in your blood.
The idea that every man gets their perfect wife and there's a fortune to be made for everyone willing to work for it is the boomer delusion. It is a tribute paid for in blood through the slaughter of two world wars establishing America's western hegemony for a roughly 50 year period that allowed its occupants to grow fat and contented. An age of plenty which spawned a generation of people who believed this is the way things would always be forever.
The blackpill is that, no, not everyone gets to be rich. Soon, not everyone will even get to live a vaguely first world existence. Not everyone gets to find a proper wife either, most of the male population has to settle for damaged goods and mentally ill rehabilitation projects. Only a select few will be cunning or shrewd enough to survive our generation's great filter.
This is the state humanity has experienced in varying degrees of severity depending on the age you were fated to live through. Your game of musical chairs has more players, less chairs, and the music is shittier.
You're in a room with 25 people and only 7 of you get to live. If someone is giving you sincere advice that's actually good when it comes to money or women, it's a knife being thrown into the brawl pile and there's no referee that guarantees it goes to you.
That is your choice, kill or die. Dave Ramsey has never been through what you're about to experience, and everyone else who could relate to you is fighting for your prize the same as you.
But hey, don't take my advice.
