If you ever had the misfortune to be caught in a doom scroll, you will know that the world and the people who live in it are full of often well meaning advice. . The problem is that most of it is unhelpful. Mainly because you didn’t really ask for it.

What often starts off as ‘advice’ soon drifts into the arena of a marketing ploy. All you have to do to become an instant millionaire is follow these five steps. Want to quite your job and go travelling in outer space, subscribe to my website. Want an athletes physique without doing any of the work, just buy a subscription to my gym programme and you will look like 1980’s Schwarzenegger in 10 days. It’s all nonsense, but it taps into something incredibly human, our desire for a better future.

We live in a time where we have literally never had it so good. The technology out our fingertips is astounding, and continues to develop at pace. The range of food and choice available to most is beyond measure. Medical advances mean on average we will live almost twice as long as our ancestors did, and yet….meh

We still yearn for something better, an ideal outside of our current situation, to be richer, happier, more productive, better. Whatever better means.

So we fill our lives with things that we believe will push us to that ideal. It rarely does. Why do so many millionaires look miserable?

Before taking any advice from anyone maybe we should consider the purpose behind the request, do we want comfort and sympathy, or honesty. Why would anyone choose to give you unsolicited advice if it wasn’t in some way aimed at improving their own situation. Perhaps they would if their is still an ounce of humanity left. I hope that’s the case.

Probably best to remember that no one has all the answers. They have only been on the planet for a very short time, perhaps less than you. So take their advice as an opinion on what might work, not what does work. Only you can decide what’s right for you.

I chose to start writing a second novel for myself. I wanted to expand the horizon of what I believe I am capable of as a writer. I was asked in an interview a couple of years ago whether I thought I had found my writing voice yet. I said that I was getting there. The more I thought about it that more I was unsure as to what the question actually means. It almost feels like a way to label the type of writer someone might become, horror, comedy, romance. Don’t us humans love putting things into nice neat little boxes. I don’t think I fit into a box, although I am sure they will try and do this once I’m dead.

Boxes tend to be helpful for the audience, we take comfort in knowing what we are going to get. If you read Philip K Dick, you know you are getting science fiction. If you read Roald Dahl you know you are getting a slightly barbed moralistic children’s story. It helps give context to the purchase, perhaps this is why some writers use pen names. It gives them access to another box.

I don’t know if I fit into any boxes yet. My first novel, Chopsticks was a ghostly thriller. I recently had a short dystopian science fiction story, Remnants published with Corollary magazine. My second novel is a comic fantasy about a selfish and weaselly anti hero called Caspar Quince. Perhaps the underlying themes are the commonality, but it doesn’t mean you have to stick to one type of writing because it has yet to be categorised. I think the same goes for any activity you choose to undertake. You might have the common themes of giving you challenge, bringing you joy or simply enjoying the compensation, but they exist at the very essence of what drives you forward.

Not that I received this directly, but I heard it the other day and it stuck with me.

Imagine you had 6 months  left to live. What would you do with that time? What would you insist on? What would give you joy?

Do that thing, now, then live the rest of your life that way.  After all,  you never know how long you have.

I started off by saying that advice is offered often without it being asked for, then spent a few lines telling you what you should do. You see, the absurd adult in me contradicts themselves constantly. But perhaps its better, rather than to tell someone what they should do, is to offer something useful, in the hope that it might help. Advice is like a small gift. You might love it, you might hate it. You might even ask if they have kept the receipt. You might put it in a cupboard and then regift it to someone else.

Keep the things that help you move forward, and discard those that don’t. Life is a strange mystery that unravels in real time. You never know when that nugget of advice might come in useful.