Advice is overrated. Useless at best, harmful at worst.

Advice is often seen as an act of wisdom, a well-intentioned attempt to guide someone through their struggles. But at its core, advice assumes a dangerous premise—that an outsider understands a person’s reality better than they do.

No one can fully experience another’s world. Thoughts can be shared, emotions can be described, but the deepest fears, subconscious patterns, and personal histories remain inaccessible. Yet, despite this fundamental gap, advice is handed out freely, as if solutions can be crafted without true understanding.

It’s rarely about malice. Most people offer advice out of concern, a need to fix, to reassure. But this very impulse is where the problem begins. It suggests that struggle is a sign of incompetence, that someone facing a challenge must be missing something obvious—something only an outsider can see. But distance does not guarantee clarity, and vulnerability does not imply blindness.

If advice were truly the key to solving problems, human beings would have evolved with the ability to step into each other’s minds, to experience reality exactly as another does. But that isn’t the case. Perhaps there’s a reason for that. Growth, learning, and self-awareness are meant to be personal journeys, not dictated by external voices.

Instead of offering solutions, maybe the real act of wisdom is offering space. Let people figure out their own worlds, just as everyone else must figure out theirs.