How To Quit Telling People What To Do
Description
I finally quit Instagram last month. There were many contributing factors—its incompatibility with long form writing, the passive-aggressive engagement norms, a constantly fluctuating algorithm—but the nail in the coffin was that I no longer wanted to tell people what to do.
Back when I was experimenting with various types of text posts on Instagram, there was one that was far-and-away the most popular: advice. Directives. How to’s. All the better if it sounded psychological, and could mimic the experience of receiving guidance from a friend. People would save, send and share these posts like nothing else.
I never knew whether such posts were favoured by the algorithm, or whether it was the individuals using the app who yearned to be told what to do, or both, but the result was the same: declaring myself an authority was clearly the way to build an empire on Instagram.
The only problem was that I didn’t like telling people what to do. Online psycho-babble has always struck me as an impossible genre: how do you offer advice that applies to everyone who reads it? In order to avoid giving some people really bad advice by accident, most influencers stick to meaningless platitudes. This allows them to take advantage of the Barnum Effect, which is a psychological phenomenon relied upon by psychics, astrologers and personality test writers, wherein people interpret statements broad enough to apply to almost anyone as highly personal. This doesn’t just make social media advice popular: it also turns those who give it into authority figures in the eyes of their audience.
The therapist-influencer also takes advantage of this effect, with one key difference: there is no illusion that their posts contain personalized advice. And yet, that can still be the emotional experience of the follower. The para-social bond that forms as a result can feel a lot like friendship on the receiving end, even when the influencer will never (and can never) know every follower. For people feeling lonely, alienated or misunderstood, this can be a comforting salve. A temporary and unreliable salve, perhaps, but a salve nonetheless.
I should know, due to my brief career as an astrologer. Over the course of my adult life, many friends had encouraged me to go into the helping professions, convinced I would make a great therapist or social worker. This idea repelled me, because getting overly involved in the emotional problems of my friends was a compulsion of mine that was often detrimental to myself and others. Astrology felt like a medium for encouraging people through emphasizing strengths and possibilities, without getting too serious or intimate. I was pretty good at it, too, but the moment I realized I didn’t actually believe that the cosmos affected personalities and world events, it felt dishonest to continue, and I closed up shop.
So I’d done my fair share of doling out pseudo-therapeutic advice, and was aware of how meaningful this could be for people. However, the risks of claiming such a role were starting to make themselves known. My posts had followers messaging me with their personal problems, asking for advice. One person wanted to write me an entire document outlining the conflict they’d had with someone who followed me (I’d never met, followed, or corresponded with either of them). I even had someone ask me for nutrition tips, a topic I’d never claimed to know anything about. It was clear that I was becoming an authority figure in the minds of a certain followers, which led them to think I was uniquely positioned to help them with their problems. This worried me.
I have favourite writers, just like everyone else, and I imagine them to be smart, thoughtful and insightful to a degree that can probably only be sustained from afar. Reading their work makes me feel close to them, a sensation which cannot possibly be mutual, and there are moments where I feel that they have something important figured out that I do not. This causes me to imagine that, if I were them, certain problems in my life would be easy to solve, or wouldn’t exist in the first place.
And yet: time and time again, meeting my heroes has shown me that they are just as flawed and uncertain as I am. We are all truly just bumbling through life, trying not to knock too many things over. If a reader has held a writer in impossibly high esteem, this discovery can feel like a disappointment—or worse, a betrayal. So these open-hearted appeals perturbed me, not due to anything pathological on the part of the sender, but because I knew I could never live up to the imaginary version of myself that they had formed through reading my work.
Even more disturbing to me was how easy—not to mention lucrative—it would be to step onto the pedestal these followers were offering me, by declaring myself an expert in the lives of strangers. I could fashion my online persona into a mirror, encouraging readers to project onto me, feel close to me, helped by me, which could develop into a powerful urge to support me.
On Instagram, the path of least resistance is to become a guru.
It’s baked right into the app: one does not have friends, but followers. It is much more laborious to counter this tendency, to continually knock myself off the pedestal, and to resist the incentives to step back onto it. Some find my refusal off-putting: they do not want their projections—whether positive or negative—to be interrupted with a vulgar reminder that I am a real person.
Over time, I watched other writers start charging for private conversations, hosting retreats, and promoting private support communities. These were all ways to create alternative income streams to complement what they made from their writing. In other words: they were monetizing their online personas, their attention and their wisdom. It wasn’t quite consulting, or therapy, or spiritual healing; it was a new hybrid, somewhere in between friendship-for-pay and sage-for-hire. It was not clear to me whether these writers had always wanted to be gurus or whether they were simply responding to economic pressures and incentives, but either way, it seemed they were no longer looking for readers so much as acolytes.
This didn’t sit right with me. At first I wondered if I was simply behind the times—early career writers are, now more than ever before, encouraged a.k.a. pressured to continuously engage with their readers—or if I was jealous that I didn’t have the influence to pull off such a move. But when I pictured myself at a quiet retreat centre deep in the woods, surrounded by people eager for my help with their issues, I didn’t feel peace or satisfaction—I felt sick. Something would have to go very wrong for me to find myself there.
Earning respect through my work as a writer and theorist is one thing; claiming to hold the answers to the personal and existential problems of those who read my work, quite another.
The latter sounds a bit too much like worship.
Building a writing career wasn’t always like this. Not that doing so was ever a walk in the park, but between the disappearance of stable writing jobs, the declining freelance rates, the shrinking book advances, and the endless supply of free writing on the internet, which has resulted in people perceiving writing as less valuable and therefore expecting free content, it’s be
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