Opinions

Our gluttonous society eats up advice without looking for context

Wake up and spend one minute smiling before getting out of bed; this is how you guarantee that you will start your day in a good mood. Spend some time focusing on your breathing before going to bed; this is how you ensure that you will sleep through the night without much discomfort. Suppress any hyper emotional feelings you may have; this is how you hold onto the person you’re sleeping with.

Which pieces of advice are solid, and which are total garbage?

People could always pull a “Supersize Me” approach to answering this question and “eat up” every piece of advice ever given them and simply catalogue their successes and failures. The person who could pull this off, though highly limited in both self and intellectual worth – being that he or she would have been merely swallowing every piece of advice found, regardless of its logic – would have an interesting story to tell.

Advice is like swiss cheese: if you eat around the holes, you don’t have to acknowledge that big chunks of substance are missing; you can just enjoy the taste of what you do chew on. This is why there are so many members of the first world society with emotional and social conflicts. They spend too much time consuming advice with no substance, ignoring the huge gaps in the logic of it all.

A magazine article says, “6 Exercises for a Flatter Stomach,” and a woman with a slow metabolism, a high-fat/high-sugar/high-carbohydrate diet will first spend $12 or more to buy the whole magazine and then spend the next three days doing the same basic abdomen routines advertised in every piece of women’s social literature that exists.

The results? The woman’s stomach does not change at all, and this is because the woman only did exactly what the magazine said to do, those six exercise moves. She didn’t change her diet or incorporate any other form of caloric burn. She merely took the advice right off the page and expected results.

As readers, as viewers and as human beings, personal laziness is increasing to the point of total ignorance and obliviousness. Viewers of any kind of content often prefer stories or arguments to be so explicit and direct that there is no need for any inference or critical analysis at all.

We are a “picture-book” kind of generation. In other words, why think about something critically when the author could do all that work for you? The reason is because when we stop thinking critically, we stop being active, necessary members of society.

In other words, we become this kind of “eating population,” which here means members of a distinct kind of people who consume every instruction and every piece of advice given to them without asking why, or why not, or considering alternatives.

These people are gluttons for “easy outs” and “quick-fixes.” Google searches like, “I want perfect skin in 24 hours,” are among the most common type of search, which goes to show that there is an increasing willingness to be spoon-fed these highly flawed and often very extravagant and useless pieces of advice, with no hesitation and with high expectations.

Paige Pelonis is a sophomore journalism and international studies major and the assistant opinions editor for the Daily 49er.
 

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