I’ll go first: “You have to have children when you’re young,” told to me when I was in my late 20s, with no desire to ever have kids, and no means to support them, by someone divorced multiple times with at least one adult child who does not speak to them.

Also: Responding to “How do I deal with this problem?” questions with “Oh, don’t worry about it, it’s enough that you’re even thinking about it!”

      • @Wisely@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        Just be yourself also is good advice. Not that it will always be successful in advancing the relationship. But it will be less stressful for you and prevent you from wasting years of your life with someone who only likes you for your fake personality.

        If you have a horrible personality work on that so just being yourself doesn’t mean being an asshole. Even then though at least anyone getting into the relationship will know that ahead of time and not after the divorce.

        • TheHalc
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          32 years ago

          “Being yourself” can be somewhat complex, though.

          Our concept of self is more fluid than most people realise, and we will often be very different in different social groups. We might not even notice this until those social groups collide. Each version of yourself is no more or less “you” than any other.

          • @Wisely@lemmy.world
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            Thanks for the quality comment. It really is difficult to define since the sense of self is just a concept to begin with.

            By being yourself, I would take that to mean being true to your intentions, interests, and general demeanor in the moment. All those can change with time.

            Avoiding things like pretending to be interested in sports, pretending to hate comics, pretending to be a “player”, pretending to be overly macho, hiding politics, etc are all things that I have seen people do. If your interests change that’s normal but I wouldn’t recommend feigning things that are untrue for you in the moment.

            I think aspiring for self improvement would still count as being true to yourself if you genuinely want to improve.

          • @donslaught@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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            72 years ago

            Is it not? If a relationship forms out of you not being yourself then that’s not healthy. Although you would have to be not-yourself constantly and at that point doesn’t that not-yourself become yourself?

            Is this a “be the change you want to see in the world” kinda thing?

  • Eggs
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    142 years ago

    “Do something that you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”

    Bullshit. I worked in the video game industry in a field I’m very passionate about with great people who were all talented. But the industry burned me out and almost killed my passion for games as a hobby with the endless unpaid overtime, constant crunch and deadlines, fairly low wage and all that investment was rewarded by eventually being let go along with all the less senior staff because our studio was bought out and the parent company told to cut expenses.

    Don’t work for the video game industry, people. Make indie games by all means. But stay clear of the big names.

    • @Addfwyn@lemmy.ml
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      42 years ago

      I have always hated that advice. While exceptions exist, there is no faster way to burn yourself out on something you love than making a career out of it. I generally do like my work (IT) now, but a lot if that is because I actively try to not even look in the direction of a computer when I am not in the office. I probably consume less tech/IT industry news now than I did before I worked in the field.

  • Meow.tar.gz
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    1852 years ago

    Get an advanced education, work harder, never be the one to say, “That is not my job” was the worst advice I could ever receive. I got into debt and was abused and exploited by my employers.

    • IninewCrow
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      192 years ago

      Some of that advice is true … work hard, work at something all the time and do your best … but always for yourself and your well being and for your own self and your family.

      I’m Indigenous Canadian and this is what all my family did including me. I worked for myself all my life … building, construction, renos, fixing stuff, building stuff all the time … I did some work for companies and businesses but always with the idea that I wouldn’t work more than I had to and only to gain a bit more money to move on as soon as possible.

      Twenty five years later … I own three properties, multiple old vehicles that I maintain myself and I own everything I have without debt … I’m not the wealthiest but I am debt free and have a healthy savings and I still work for myself gaining a bit more every time .

      • Meow.tar.gz
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        202 years ago

        Your experience is the exception rather than the rule. It’s been shown that rags to riches is a myth perpetrated by capitalism. At one time I had your level of success. It was all taken from me when I became disabled. As a Canadian, you have the distinct advantage of at least some social welfare assistance whereas your neighbor to the south has virtually none.

        • IninewCrow
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          32 years ago

          I agree that the whole rags to riches idea is a complete sham that doesn’t exist … unless you are already born wealthy … and then that doesn’t make any sense because you never had rags to begin with.

          My story is more rags or bare clothing … I’m not wealthy … I just have enough to be comfortable … I’m not in debt and I drive old beater cars and trucks and never owned a new vehicle in my life … I bought small properties away from big city centers where land is cheap but living is hard

          And yes … I know most people are probably not capable of doing what I did … I grew up with lots of people in my situation and I was fortunate enough to figure a way out, mostly through the luck of finding the right partner who worked just as hard as me, parents who were great guides and teachers and a small network of family and friends I could count on.

      • @ritswd@lemmy.world
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        62 years ago

        I have a less impressive, but similar story to yours. I’d say it’s fine to work hard and do work that’s not your job, but the key is to follow through by demanding the proper acknowledgement and gratification for it. Like, doing it for free a couple of times to be nice is fine, but after that, the value you bring with this has to be properly acknowledged and compensated.

        If you’ve been working hard and helping out, and an employer doesn’t gratify you to that value, the proper response is not to give up and pin it on hard work being the problem. That employer is being the problem. Try to change that if you can at all.

    • @axolittl@lemmy.worldOP
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      822 years ago

      Oof. A lot of “helpful advice” about jobs is helpful not for the workers, but for the owning class.

      • TornadoRex
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        642 years ago

        The problem is that when the people giving that advice were working, it was great advice. Companies took care of their employees. Tenure mattered. Companies today are mindless corporate blobs that only care about spreadsheet numbers and the next quarter’s results.

        • @axolittl@lemmy.worldOP
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          472 years ago

          Maybe in some situations in the past owners were better to their workers, but in many cases there is an unbroken line of exploitation going back in the past. The idea that exploitation is an extremely new phenomenon benefits the owning class by concealing the long and bloody history of proletarian struggles.

          • TornadoRex
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            92 years ago

            Oh absolutely there was exploitation. Especially in certain industries.

          • @xantoxis@lemmy.one
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            312 years ago

            If your children would just adopt a can-do attitude while they’re mining, they’d be getting promotions

  • QubaXR
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    2 years ago

    Don’t ever quit.

    Screw that. Quitting is healthy, quitting is good. Nothing worse than digging yourself deeper and deeper based on sunk cost fallacy.

    • @limestoned@lemm.ee
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      202 years ago

      Absolutely! Strategic quitting is an option that people don’t use enough. Definitely improved my quality of life!

    • Kafanzi Max. Praetor
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      102 years ago

      as everything this has contexts in which is valuable and contests in which it’s not

      don’t quit because you’re demoralised. don’t quit because you’re tired. don’t quit because it’s hard.

      if your first natural response to adversities is flying instead of fighting, it’s telling you to fight, because you are likely the only person losing when flying.

      it’s not about never change your mind. never critically think what’s the situation and if it’s still worth it.

      or check up with yourself and see if that’s still what you want.

      after all leaving a situation you don’t want anymore, it’s not quitting, it’s moving on

      it seems just semantics, it’s about knowing yourself and being honest with yourself.

      nothing is black or white

      • jrs100000
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        102 years ago

        You dont have to keep going if you are tired and demoralized either. You dont owe pain and suffering and missed opportunities to your past self. You can quit any time you want for any reason or no reason at all, just be prepared to accept the consequences.

    • @axolittl@lemmy.worldOP
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      452 years ago

      “Don’t be a quitter” is like saying “Fuck your boundaries. Stay in toxic situations no matter how bad they get.”

      • @CoderKat@lemm.ee
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        12 years ago

        “Don’t be a quitter” is something that makes sense if you’re in the middle of a board game or the likes. It definitely shouldn’t be applied to big things like jobs or relationships.

      • Alien Surfer
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        62 years ago

        If I’m sick of something, I don’t quit, I change direction.

  • @kakes@sh.itjust.works
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    812 years ago

    My dad threw a party to celebrate when I graduated university with a degree in Computer Science.

    At the party, my dad’s friend took me aside and said “My nephew just got a degree in electrical engineering. Now that’s an up and coming field, you should get a degree in that.”

    Like, alright buddy. Hopefully that career pays well enough for another four years of student debt. I’m still kinda in shock at how dumb of a thing to say that was.

    • niktemadur
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      42 years ago

      Echoes of The Graduate

      “I’ve got one word for you, Benjamin. One word only. Are you listening?”
      “Yes, sir.”
      “Plastics.”

    • @Krakatoa@lemmy.film
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      272 years ago

      Ah yes the brand new exciting world of electricity. Rumor on the street is they’ve got this fancy new device called a tellyfone that uses this electricity. You can talk to anyone in the world!

  • 👍Maximum Derek👍
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    772 years ago

    Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.

    1. Every day is a day I’d rather have off.
    2. It ruined the thing I loved (programming) for me
    • @lugal@lemmy.one
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      282 years ago

      “Nothing is fun 8 hours a day” isn’t an advice but at least it’s true

      • 👍Maximum Derek👍
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        152 years ago

        In the 90’s before I was doing it professionally, I used to go on massive 10 - 15 hour binge programming sessions only stopping when I realized I hadn’t eaten in that entire time. It was some of the best fun I’ve ever had. But it happened rarely and organically, not 5 days a week on a predetermined schedule.

        • @funnyletter@lemmy.one
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          62 years ago

          I like programming, and I program for a living, but there is nobody on earth who gets out of bed every day and is like “Aw yiss I’m gonna go code a bunch of salesforce integrations!”

          I’ve been working long enough that at this point my work goal is like, I want a job that 95% of the time I do not actively dread. I don’t need to be excited about it, I just need it to be fine.

        • @lugal@lemmy.one
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          32 years ago

          Totally relatable! As you already pointed out, it’s the “a day” part. I like listening to the radio but I talked to a former car radio tester who said that his car radio is never on and he enjoys the silence. It’s one thing to do stuff you like when you want to, maybe even binge, and another to have a schedule.

          I started programming at school and when I studied computer science, another student asked me after the first semester what I’m going to program on vacation. I stared at them and said I have vacation. Now I programm full time and barely in my free time.

      • @jnato90@lemmy.world
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        82 years ago

        My experience may be an outlier but…

        Formal education was great for me, promise of working with cutting edge technologies. Vast amount of opportunities working in the IT sector. I was excited and happy for starting my second career choice.

        As for the job I’ve landed, acceptable-better pay/benefits than most, the most backwards tech to work with and managing environment. I’d like to fantasize about leaving but with the work ethic in my area I can’t escape it without a drastic move.

        • @eth0p@iusearchlinux.fyi
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          22 years ago

          Ah, that’s fair.

          I’m having the opposite experience, unfortunately. I loved working at {co-op company} where I had a choice of developer environment (OS, IDE, and the permissions to freely install whatever software was needed without asking IT) and used Golang for most tasks.

          The formal education has been nothing but stress and anxiety, though. Especially exams.

          • @jnato90@lemmy.world
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            22 years ago

            Ah wow that’s a great experience for your co-op! You know maybe i’m rose tinting a little bit now that you’ve mentioned exams haha, but yeah I’d still say it’s been interesting working in the field for me to say the least.

            • @eth0p@iusearchlinux.fyi
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              Yep! I ended up doing my entire co-op with them, and it meshed really well with my interest in creating developer-focused tooling and automation.

              Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to make the necessary changes and get approval from legal to open-source it, but I spent a good few months creating a tool for validating constraints for deployments on a Kubernetes cluster. It basically lets the operations team specify rules to check deployments for footguns that affect the cluster health, and then can be run by the dev-ops teams locally or as a Kubernetes operator (a daemon service running on the cluster) that will spam a Slack channel if a team deploys something super dangerous.

              The neat part was that the constraint checking logic was extremely powerful, completely customizable, versioned, and used a declarative policy language instead of a scripting language. None of the rules were hard-coded into the binary, and teams could even write their own rules to help them avoid past deployment issues. It handled iterating over arbitrary-sized lists, and even could access values across different files in the deployment to check complex constraints like some value in one manifest didn’t exceed a value declared in some other manifest.

              I’m not sure if a new tool has come along to fill the niche that mine did, but at the time, the others all had their own issues that failed to meet the needs I was trying to satisfy (e.g. hard-coded, used JavaScript, couldn’t handle loops, couldn’t check across file boundaries, etc.).

              It’s probably one of the tools I’m most proud of, honestly. I just wish I wrote the code better. Did not have much experience with Go at the time, and I really could have done a better job structuring the packages to have fewer layers of nested dependencies.

              • @jnato90@lemmy.world
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                22 years ago

                That is truly so amazing! Honestly experiences like those are so worth it, but I feel for you not being able to make it open source then. If you haven’t already started on something else, I’m sure it’ll be some motivation for you down the road. Sorry for delayed response, crazy ass week for me lol.

    • @Kelly@lemmy.world
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      52 years ago

      On the other hand I avoided going into the field until I hit 30 because I didn’t want to spend all day on a computer and then have it effect my willingness to use a PC at home.

      Of course you don’t have to be a programmer to be stuck in front of a PC all day so I figured I might as well do something I’m good at. The main shift was that I now strongly prefer console/couch/tv gaming over PC/monitor/desk gaming.

      That said I still find I come home unmotivated for hobby dev, if I’m going to work on my hobby projects I need to get out of bed 60-90 minutes earlier and do that while I’m fresh.

      • @AdmiralRob@lemmy.zip
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        62 years ago

        The main shift was that I now strongly prefer console/couch/tv gaming over PC/monitor/desk gaming.

        This is the big one for me. My co-workers all wonder why I switched from pc to PlayStation, and I’m like, “dude, you just watched me troubleshoot 10 machines that failed our OS upgrade, and you think I want to come home and find that Windows update just broke my sound drivers again?”

  • @DarthKermit@lemmy.ml
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    I was in a “troubled youth” cult for many years. “Unhelpful advise” is an understatement compared to the heaps of fear-driven doctrines and rituals we had to follow, lest be homeless. I could go on for days about this topic, but the biggest “unhelpful advice” was to cut all of my childhood friends from my life completely, on the basis of “my own good.” I am now a virtual stranger to them, and although I’ve somewhat made amends, nothing will ever make up for our lost years.

  • @lazylion_ca@lemmy.ca
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    342 years ago

    Student loans are an investment in your future.

    I’d have been better off becoming an electrician.

  • I was a new dog owner, went to /r/Dogs to ask about a particular behavior my dog was exhibiting I’d never seen or read about before (turned out to be normal tho) and every reply I got basically told me I don’t know how to care for an animal and that I should give him to someone else.

    It was then I realized that it wasn’t just /r/RelationshipAdvice that was full of bitter, jealous losers whose advice is always “dump them.” It applied to literally every single subreddit dedicated to advice. They may have started with good intentions and knowledgeable people, but over time filled up with people who had no business giving anyone advice.

    • @ezchili@iusearchlinux.fyi
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      Oh yeah even lifeprotips, if you go in the comments it’s just full of people grasping at straws to find the tip useless and upvoting each other’s cynicism

      There was one: “If you want a fridge’s compressor to turn on and off less frequently (ie: if you sleep in the same room), fill it with water bottles to increase thermal mass” and the top comments were “Actual life pro tio: get an apartment with 2 rooms???”

      I was like: are these people actually that slow?

      The less there is to say about an advice, the less reasons you have to go write a comment. Therefore the people in the comments are often outliers

    • @idle@158436977.xyz
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      112 years ago

      As a fellow dog owner, the internet always seems to be the most judgemental place to get dog advice. If you dont spend 6 hours a day training your dog, feed the top of the line kibble, and vax them for diseases only 3 dogs have got ever, then you dont deserve to have a dog.

      • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 🏆
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        This is true. Even random articles found on search engines give messed up advice.

        “Can dogs eat avocado?”

        Websites: “Yes. No. Maybe? They are toxic. But what makes them toxic doesn’t affect dogs. At least not as much. Don’t give them avocado.”

        • @funnyletter@lemmy.one
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          32 years ago

          People get so hand-wringy about what dogs can and can’t eat. Like I’ve had people tell me not to let my dog eat apple because there’s a chemical in apple seeds that’s converted to cyanide in the gut.

          Like, first of all, I’m not feeding the seeds to my dog, and second of all there’s not enough of that stuff in one apple’s worth of seeds to hurt you, and third of all you’d have to basically chew the seeds into powder, a thing that dogs famously do not do, to get even that tiny harmless amount.

          It’s not safe for dogs to eat chocolate, grapes, or alliums. Everything else is kinda fine. (And tbh growing up my family dogs ate all of those things a few times and were fine – how dangerous it is depends on the concentration of the toxic thing, the size of the dog, etc.)

  • Lettuce eat lettuce
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    462 years ago

    “You just have to work through the pain.” I’ve injured myself multiple times in the past exercising by following this idiotic advice.

    It’s one thing to push through discomfort, that’s how your body gets stronger. But If you’re in actual pain, stop and listen to the alarm bells your body is giving you.

  • @Jellojiggle@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    632 years ago

    “Just have one or two and then stop” when telling a friend I’m an alcoholic. Well shit, thanks! That never even crossed my mind!

    • TheHalc
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      82 years ago

      Which would inevitably be followed by “Just one more can’t hurt!”…

      I hope you’re doing better now.

      • @Jellojiggle@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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        102 years ago

        That is absolutely what follows. I am doing MUCH better, I’ve had 2.5 years sober in the last 3 years because I thought I was “cured” and started “moderating” last summer. The stop drinking subreddit was amazing insight and help. It’s on lemmy but the only posts are the daily checkin. I should start being more active on it to boost it.

  • @XiELEd@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    82 years ago

    2 days ago we had a moving up ceremony, and the speaker said that the secret to a successful life is “Honor your parents and Honor God”. That advice wouldn’t apply to everyone…

  • Nioxic
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    I went to my doctor for an infection (i had a swelling in my throat)

    My doctor told me to drink water…

    I said… “ok, thanks” and left.

    Got a 2nd opinion.

    This new doctor actually took a blood sample and gave me antibiotics. I was much better just a few hours later.

    • @the_third@feddit.de
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      372 years ago

      I always tell them “Following that logic, there’s only one person in the world that can complain. But that dude really got it bad.”

      • @rmuk@feddit.uk
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        382 years ago

        My counter is always, “and there are people better off than you, so stop being happy.”