Online platforms flood feeds with confidently delivered, bite-sized life advice from people lacking domain expertise and limited experience. Many items are obvious platitudes framed as revelations: eat intuitively, embrace nature, exercise compassion, contact friends and put down phones. Different demographics receive tailored variations, but the thrust is uniform: actionable certainty presented in lists and reels that demand engagement. The format exploits vulnerability and bewilderment, offering quick fixes that feel satisfying but rarely solve deeper uncertainty. Nostalgia for a less prescriptive internet coexists with recognition that endless content consumption will not cure personal confusion.
Take, for example, advice that will supposedly change your brain chemistry, courtesy of someone who is definitely not a neuroscientist. Or my nutrition rules, from a dewy, gen Alpha sylph who doesn't realise what they actually have is a teenager's metabolism. Or 45 things you need to understand about a place from someone who has spent 45 minutes there. Endless lists of the bleeding obvious: eat intuitively, embrace nature, exercise compassion, remain curious, be childlike, contact friends, put down your phone,
I sort of admire the confidence it must take to tell people what to do. I can barely muster a tentative suggestion of what to have for dinner (crisps?). But it also makes me pine for the internet before everything was a bossy, bullet-pointed self-optimisation plan; for the gentler days of cat memes and rambling blog posts about strangers' marital problems.
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