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Daily Archives: October 9, 2017

My Best Advice for Dealing with “Askholes”

Askholes: they invoke fury in the tender-hearted, and rancor in the benevolent. Fortunately, I have a solution/advice for dealing with askholes once and for all: Stop giving people advice. They probably don’t really want it. (Admittedly, there are exceptions to this. Like when your friend calls and says, “How do I assemble this Ikea bookshelf?” or asks you to advise them on the best chocolate chip cookie recipe.  Then, they probably really do want you to tell them what to do.) But when they ask what they should do about their career change/their cheating partner/their child’s addiction/their depression/breastfeeding/sleep training/etc, they probably do not want advice. (Or in some cases, they really do want your advice, but after they’ve heard ideas from a number of sources, they want to make their own decision like the free-will toting humans they are.) Yes, yes, I know… they specifically asked us for our wisdom, our insight, our brilliant step-by-step instructions. Or at least implied that they would otherwise benefit from said wisdom. However, the issue here is people often don’t ask for…