by Tom Cox at The Villager: In my experience, it is the people who seem most adamant that they know the correct way to live, and are most keen to instruct others to live in the same way that they do, who are often the most frighteningly unforgiving and controlling to be around. I suppose that’s one thing I have learned in a life that has mostly taught me that I know nothing. Another is that the illusion that much of the advice industry is based around – that there is a plateau where everything is sorted and nice forever – is nothing more than that: an illusion. If you ask me for some advice, I might give it, but with the proviso that I’m just muddling through and my good advice will not necessarily be your good advice. If you’d said to me in 2022, for example, “Tom, which tortilla chips would you recommend that I purchase to go with a hot salsa dip?”, I would recommend you purchased the budget tortilla chips from Co-op, but that would be based on the fact I was regularly shopping at Co-op at that point, and that I personally dislike Doritos, which were the only other option on offer in that establishment. At no point, after walking along a street and seeing a family I’d never met eating Doritos in the comfort of their own home, would I smash that family’s dining room window and tell them their life philosophy was incorrect. Similarly, I’m not going to use this Substack page to offer you ten bullet points on how to be the writer you should be. If I did, it would end up being far too tailored to writing like me, which would be bad advice, since the person you should be writing like is yourself.
About six years ago, in the same spot in the same pool where the old lady with between 32 and 48 corvids in her voice pretended to mistake me for her father then gave me some unsolicited advice on how to improve my front crawl, another female stranger, less than half her age, turned to me and said, “You know what? Fuck this. I’m getting out.” Overall, I preferred the earlier of the two incidents. Some might say it was a little unhinged: the woman and I had never met or spoken to each other before and it might be claimed I didn’t need to know she was getting out of the pool. But I enjoyed the implication of her outburst: that she and I were bound by a mutual hardship, this terrible thing called “swimming”, and that she was taking a much-needed stand against it. Also, she wasn’t recommending that I got out of the pool with her, merely informing me that was what she was doing, and implying that I could follow her if I wished. It improved my day. This was in contrast to yesterday’s incident, which, though I’m going to choose to see it as well-intentioned, made me enjoy swimming far less than I had been up to that point. I did actually try the hand advice offered, but it didn’t suit me, make me more aquatically dynamic or a happier person. It just made me stressed, which, a few minutes later, gave me cramp, which prompted me to cut my swim short. I’m not going to the pool today. I’m going to the sea. Yes, it has its drawbacks: it’s too big to do lengths in, I got stung on the nose by a jellyfish there on Wednesday, and there’s sewage in quite a bit of it nowadays. But there’s no entry fee and it reliably makes me feel wonderful every time I’m in it. I’ll stretch out and do some gentle half-schooled crawl, unhurried by other swimmers, freeing my mind of unwanted clutter. After a while, if the sun’s out, I’ll swim out a little further and let myself starfish on the surface. As I do, I will empty my mind and let it fill with nothing but the light ambient noise around me: the shingle moving beneath the waves, the hum of the motor on a distant boat, and the gentle, reliably soothing sound of nobody trying to offer anybody any advice.
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