Am I okay? Am I healthy? Am I happy?

Introducing a new advice column by Sophie Haigney

Hello! I’m a writer, editor, and frequent Drift contributor. You might also know me as a Grateful Dead enthusiast. I’m going to be writing an advice column for The Drift’s newsletter. I will answer questions from readers, and will also take some space in each installment to examine the role of advice in our culture. What kinds of things are people telling us to do in order to better our lives? What particular flavor of self-improvement or snake oil is for sale? We can learn a lot, I think, from the type of advice we’re getting, and giving.

We live in a time overstuffed with advice. A lot of it is bad. The forms it takes: front-facing videos of young women speaking into the camera, ticking off red flags about hypothetical men you might encounter on dates. An Instagram reel in which someone explains how a concept that originated in cognitive behavioral therapy will change your life. A tweet about how taking “Chinese peptides” and quitting deodorant will definitely change your life. The endless pit of Reddit, where I have found myself at my most desperate, trying to establish whether what I am feeling or experiencing is “normal.” Am I okay? Am I healthy? Am I happy? Am I waking up at the right time, and taking the right supplements? Am I the asshole? The posts on that particular subreddit, which describe an event, or a “situation” — often one just slightly outside the realm of plausibility — end invariably with a question: who is at fault? Me, or someone else? There are recurring characters, like sisters-in-law and husbands, who tend to deserve the blame, but not always. The pleasure of Reddit is that the commenters decide and they do so with gusto. It’s a crowdsourced morality play that always ends with a verdict: you’re the asshole, or someone else is.

We might be forgiven for craving some kind of certainty right now: beyond the persistence of age-old problems with husbands and sisters-in-law, our social order has fractured dramatically over the last two decades and even the last two years and even the last two months. We’re living in the wake of social movements that have generated sudden shockwaves and immediate upheaval but uneven long-term change. In the meantime, we've seen a wave of conservative backlash in response. We’re also living, I believe, in the aftermath of an era that valorized a certain kind of ambivalence, that made it seem like a virtue to hedge and hem and haw. During the presidency of Barack Obama, we were perpetually asked to look for nuance: on the one hand, on the other hand. These calls to nuance have mostly faded in the wake of that era’s disappointments, and the sharp rise of a brand of conservative politics that draws its power, in large part, from admitting no gray area. The “it’s complicated” posture is now out of vogue on both sides of the political aisle. So why wouldn’t we seek the relief of total clarity in our personal lives too? We can look to advice-givers online for outside assurance that everything is as black-and-white as we might want it to be: dump him! This type of hardline advice is not confined to one single forum on Reddit but endemic to our entire digital culture. People refract their personal experiences onto others and assume: what worked for me will work for you. There is a right path, and I will tell you what it is.

One thing about advice, though, is that almost no one ever takes it. People ask each other all the time, what should I do? And it is my belief that in general they are hoping their chosen oracle will confirm or articulate feelings they are already having. Often, to ask for advice is to ask for permission to do something you were going to do anyway. This is, I suspect, why Cheryl Strayed’s advice on the question of leaving or staying has had such a long afterlife on the internet. Responding to multiple letters in her “Dear Sugar” column on this question, she wrote in 2011 about her own experience in her first marriage, recalling how she heard “a tiny clear voice that would not, no matter what I did, stop saying go.” Listen to that voice, she says. Her advice, in other words, is for readers to act on what they already feel or think they might feel.

A decade ago, I wrote in to the Boston Globe’s advice column with a question similar to the above: should I stay or should I go? It seems strange now that I did this, especially since I was asking advice from everyone around me and ignoring the answers. I must have wanted the columnist to tell me something I hadn’t heard before. She didn’t. She was not particularly ambivalent: it seems like you want to go, so you should. Did I listen? Of course not. Was the advice columnist right? It’s hard to say, given that our lives unfold as they are going to unfold, each choice building on the last. So a question might arise: why bother with advice at all? If advice is not a good way of getting a friend to make a better choice, advice columns certainly are not effective means of getting anyone to do anything. They collapse the private and public sphere, give us little windows into the problems of strangers; it can be a form of voyeurism to read them, which I always do, and which might help reassure you that you have problems just like other people, or that you don’t — that you’re doing better.

But good advice writing allows us to publicly interrogate principles, norms, and the stakes of the questions we ask ourselves. Giving advice does often mean taking a position, and that’s a good thing. I think some things are right and some things are wrong. We owe things to people we love; we owe things even to strangers; we should look outward more than we look inward. We should aim to focus our attention instead of letting it wander, which is easier said than done. Plenty of situations that arise do exist in muddier territory than Redditors and influencers would have you believe, but I think it’s worth staking out a claim, even if you later change your mind; this is what we must do in life and we might as well not pretend otherwise.

I hope to do this in my new advice column in this newsletter. If someone asks a question, I intend to try to answer it, rather than writing a sideways essay about something else. (I prefer the pithy, practical answers you find in newspaper advice columns, even when they’re wrongheaded, to the gooey Substack posts that use problems as “jumping-off points.”) I hope to be conclusive in ways that are surprising and that might not supply what the person asking or reading the question hopes to hear: eschewing lists of universal “red flags” or the affirmation of “boundaries” or the apportionment of blame. Good advice columns do rely on good questions: that is, specific ones, and ones that are genuinely curious about others and oneself. You can ask me about work, about friendships, about romance, about the inner workings of your own mind. Attention and distraction, in particular, seem to me aspects of our lives that are often neglected in advice columns, since they typically focus on situations, dynamics, and things we do rather than how we think.

I’m less interested in being right than in argument; we may in the future put me in conversation with other Drift editors or writers on a particular question. The idea is, maybe, that all good advice is part of a longer conversation, an ongoing one. I recently came across an entry in an old journal of mine about a friend. I wrote, “Devon and I talk in circles, but it always feels like we get somewhere.” I sent her this, a decade later, and she said she thought perhaps we talked more in spirals. I hope this column will talk in spirals, too.

Send your submissions to letters@thedriftmag.com with “Advice” in the subject line.

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Image credit: John Sloan, The Masses, December 1912