The internet is littered with advice. What's it doing to your brain?

Vox

5 days ago

As the eldest daughter in a family of six siblings, with a brain wired for strong convictions, Amy Lentz was born to give advice.
Lentz is a 36-year-old with sea green eyes and wavy brown hair worthy of a shampoo commercial. She works as the chief people officer — the head of human resources — at Toms, the Los Angeles-based footwear company. To hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok and Instagram, however, Lentz is known as @HackYourHR: a friendly face dispensing wisdom about career and workplace matters, from networking more effectively and receiving feedback without getting defensive to radiating 'executive presence' and navigating lowball job offers. 'As an older sister, I got called bossy,' she laughs, 'and in real life, as an adult, I get called helpful!'
For decades, this kind of public-facing life advice was popular in syndicated newspaper columns, then on blogs and websites, and now it's everywhere on social media. While scrolling your platform of choice, it's easy to find yourself immersed in a world of bite-sized videos that, like Lentz's, dole out tips for performing better at work, optimizing your potential, and navigating relationship issues. (Exercise and diet advice are a whole other can of keto-friendly worms.)
Some advice-givers are true subject matter experts, and others are ordinary people speaking from their personal experience. In either case, the creator's confidence and the gravity of the subject matter might make you pause your scroll. Here are the two books that will supercharge your business. Here's how to get over the fear that's stopping you from living the life you want. Did you know you can just wake up and have different standards for yourself?
When Lentz started consistently posting videos in early 2023, she discovered that people were eager for professional guidance. 'The positive feedback really was kind of life-changing,' she says. 'For the first six months, I replied to every single DM and email that I received from people asking for my advice.' People sent screenshots of offer letters, asking her how to respond, and Lentz, locking into big sister mode, would just write the email for them. Some of the messages she received were painful and personal. After the death of a family member, one person felt they couldn't take time off, for fear of letting their team down, and wondered what to do. 'I think people are desperate to understand [whether] they're doing the right thing or not,' says Lentz.
This is something of a desperate moment. Politically and economically, Americans are living through a period of tremendous uncertainty, as well as a loneliness crisis. For anyone worried about the security of their job or savings — and for anyone who feels they don't have close friends to consult on life's myriad challenges — there's an obvious appeal to video creators who seem sure of the path forward.
A willingness to hear advice is not only understandable, but smart, as it leads to better decision-making. 'Research has overwhelmingly found that advice is really beneficial, and that people tend to under-utilize advice, usually causing them to make lower quality decisions,' says Lyn van Swol, a professor of communication science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies advice and information-sharing in groups. The catch, she notes, is that most of that research looks at advice from one, two, or three other people, not dozens, hundreds, or thousands of strangers on TikTok: 'It's overwhelming — it's like a fire hose of advice.'
When the right piece of wisdom reaches the right ears at precisely the right time, it can hit like a bolt of lightning. But for every earth-shaking revelation delivered on social media, you can spend hours scrolling through more mundane, but nevertheless urgent, guidance from self-assured individuals with varying levels of expertise. With so many voices on your screen, it would be reasonable to start feeling disoriented or anxious, unsure about your own decision-making skills. Short of deleting your apps, how are you supposed to wade through the morass, taking what's useful and discarding what isn't, as you make your way toward the better life that so many people already seem to be living?
Seeking the wisdom of perfect strangers
There are many ways of delivering advice, some more effective than others. It will shock nobody to learn that uninvited advice tends to go over very poorly. 'People are very resistant to taking unsolicited advice,' says Reeshad Dalal, a professor of psychology at George Mason University with a research background in decision-making and advice. Dalal then poses this question: Does a TikTok video qualify as unsolicited advice? Well, yes, in the sense that you didn't ask for that video to cross your feed. But then again, the algorithm did serve it to you based on your interests and viewing history — so could it be called semi-solicited advice?
Van Swol categorizes advice videos as 'masspersonal.' They're interpersonal, but with mass reach; directed at the viewer, but not at you specifically. If part of the problem with unsolicited advice is that it feels judgmental, masspersonal advice smoothes away some of that unwelcome scrutiny and affords the viewer the buffer of anonymity. Offline, good advisers often employ the tactic of laying out a narrative around a problem before launching into their recommendation — a framework reflected on TikTok, where creators tend to blend advice with a personal story. Add in the parasocial element of social media, wherein influencers start to feel like your friends, and you have a recipe for advice that's surprisingly palatable, even though you didn't actively ask for it.
According to social media creators, there's something else at play, too: a very real sense of loneliness and a hunger for answers. Chelsea Anderson, the self-styled 'Michael Jordan of babysitting' who shares hacks for child care and adult life on TikTok and Instagram, says that she has always consulted her female friends — 'a group of mirrors' — when she needs to make a big life decision. She feels that TikTok now serves as a space for people to do that external processing, not because it's better than in-person bonds but because they don't necessarily have anywhere else to turn. 'Community is disappearing, and I think that's why this content hits,' says Anderson. 'That room full of mirrors is harder and harder to access in real life.'
In a world of unknowns, simple and concrete statements are a comfort — and the urge to seek out other people's advice is painfully, sweetly human.
Americans are so lonely that the US Surgeon General's office released an advisory in 2023 stating that social isolation has an impact on mortality comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Although the hacks Anderson features in her videos are often lighthearted and imaginative, she has received messages from followers that seem like a true cry for help. 'Some of the questions people ask me make me really sad, because they're not questions you should be asking someone on the internet. They are questions you should be asking your best friend or your mom,' Anderson says, adding that she appreciates that people feel comfortable coming to her.
Lentz has noticed a similar undercurrent of distress in the questions she receives about nailing job interviews and landing raises. 'I think people feel like they're getting left behind, for a number of reasons, and they desperately do not want to become irrelevant,' she says. Some of this fear is rooted in social comparison, but much of it is tied to daily concerns about funding retirement accounts and covering child care costs. ' If I were to get this promotion, I could afford more day care. So there's so much pressure on this interview,' Lentz says. 'There's so much weight to people's fears, and I think it's all justified based on our economy.'
Doris Chang, an associate professor at NYU's Silver School of Social Work and a licensed clinical psychologist, understands the appeal of short-form advice videos on TikTok. 'There is a human attraction towards things that are really simplified,' she says. 'I can see people going, 'I feel like crap. This video is telling me something to do, and it's only two minutes long.'' She also notes that these videos aren't a substitute for therapy; professional counseling, however, can be expensive and difficult to access.
In a world of unknowns, simple and concrete statements are a comfort — and the urge to seek out other people's advice is painfully, sweetly human. Who among us, grappling with a major conundrum, hasn't reached out to a trusted friend, family member, or counselor, hoping they'll shake a new solution loose or summon some wisdom we can't access yet? In these conversations, we lay ourselves bare, with our fears and insecurities on full display, and ask for help making sense of our mess. When we're meant to travel this life together, there's a deep loneliness in problems you don't feel that you can ask anyone about. So we do the next best thing — we go online.
This is your brain on TikTok advice
Self-improvement via TikTok is complicated by the fact that time spent on the apps can be a drain on mental health. Passive use of social media — scrolling — has been shown to be associated with anxiety and depression in adolescents, says Jacqueline Sperling, an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and co-program director of the McLean Anxiety Mastery Program at McLean Hospital. (Active participation through posting and commenting, however, can have a positive impact on people, helping them find community and foster connections with others.) It's not just young people who are affected by social media: Research has shown that older adults who use social media are more likely to report symptoms of depression. Any wisdom gleaned from short-form life advice videos sits on a balance with these potential downsides.
For people with anxiety in particular, looking at a lot of advice content on social media might end up exacerbating their worries. 'It can actually have this harmful function of feeding the desire for reassurance,' says Chang. 'There's an unlimited amount of information that can confirm or disconfirm your biggest fears and worries. For someone who's seeking certainty in the world, because that's what anxiety is really about, then being on social media a whole bunch is not going to be helpful.'
In the field of decision psychology, too, Dalal sees a vicious cycle with anxiety and advice-seeking behavior. 'The finding is pretty robust: When people are anxious about a decision, they will seek out more advice. ... The reverse can be true as well,' says Dalal. 'Anxiety leads to seeking out advice, but knowing that there's all this advice out there might, paradoxically, increase anxiety as well.'
Even among people who aren't particularly anxious, though, information overload can result in a feeling of overwhelm. 'There's a classical idea called 'the paradox of choice,'' says Dalal. 'If you go into a grocery store, and I show you 30 varieties of jam and say you can have one for free, that might stress you out. But if I give you three varieties of jam, you would walk away happy that you made the right choice.' Advice, he says, will operate in the same way.
There is another way in which advice videos might affect viewers, and that is as a performance of confidence. In this corner of TikTok, creators are often the picture of self-assurance, speaking clearly and succinctly as they share their guidance, their eyes never straying from the camera. To a certain extent, advice videos are simply a vessel for the reality distortion that takes place across social media more broadly: People often present the most put-together versions of themselves online, leading viewers to feel badly about themselves in comparison. 'The contrast is really stark,' says Chang. 'You're like, my apartment doesn't look like that, and I'm not that confident, and I don't have the answers.'
The most successful TikTok advisers may well be those who are most able to express self-confidence. 'A huge problem in advice research is that people are very persuaded by confidence,' says van Swol. It doesn't matter whether the advice is great or subpar: 'You have a lot of very confident people out there giving advice, and people cannot tell the difference.' (Meanwhile, people with a weak sense of self are especially prone to taking advice.)
'A huge problem in advice research is that people are very persuaded by confidence.'
Some of those confident people are, no doubt, offering solid guidance and attempting to do so in good faith. Lentz is well aware of the power that she holds as someone giving advice online. 'I have high self-esteem, so if the person on the other end of the phone has a lower sense of self, sense of identity, they are susceptible,' she says. 'I do think there's responsibility with what you put out.'
Still, when you're watching not one or two but dozens of advice videos, it's hard not to suspect that everyone has things figured out except for you — when, in fact, you're not as underqualified to navigate life as you might think. Nor is there a secret shortcut that nobody told you about. 'There is this desire for a magic formula,' says Chang, 'and if people are offering it with a lot of confidence, it does silence your own intuition about what might be best for you.'
So, how do you navigate a world too full of advice?
Across the board, experts say that the best way to move through the sea of life advice on social media is to spend some time interrogating a creator's credentials, background, and expertise before taking their suggestions. Sperling recommends using intriguing videos as a jumping-off point for consulting trusted sources and experts off of those platforms: 'The key thing is to not act immediately and to take that as an opportunity to learn more.'
Interestingly, content creators say essentially the same thing. 'I think oftentimes, especially when it comes to people who post content, we assume they know something that we don't,' says Donavan Barrett, a 28-year-old tae kwon do teacher-turned-personal branding coach. 'Sometimes they do, but oftentimes they're just a regular person who decided to pick up their phone and record their opinion.'
Barrett studied psychology in college and says he has always been the 'therapy friend' to those in his life. He now makes videos about mindset and motivation on TikTok, which reflect the type of work he does with private clients. In his videos, which often deal with overcoming self-doubt, he tries to show up as the person whose guidance he could have used as a young person. 'I come from a background where I wasn't given the education, the resources, or the know-how to trust myself,' he explains.
Barrett knows how a green screen and a mini microphone can convey a sense of authority — he's made those kinds of videos, too. As a result, he recommends vetting creators before taking their advice and watching out for those who are overly prescriptive in their messaging, particularly when they've made it their business to issue guidance. 'The coaching industry, the advice industry, is huge and seems to only be growing,' he says. 'There are a lot of people who are going to project their experiences or shove you into their box.'
Chang expresses a similar idea: 'Therapy is all about excavating and reflecting on your unique situation, strengths, resources, and contexts.' If advice videos don't accommodate an individual's specificity and instead offer one-size-fits-all solutions, she says, 'I think it's kind of a scam.'
People are generally alike, 'ashamed of their needs and afraid to voice them, afraid to honor themselves, afraid to show their vulnerable hearts.'
When figuring out which sources of advice to trust, Dalal recommends looking at trustworthiness, which encompasses both expertise and good intentions — the latter of which can be difficult to judge. As part of that due diligence, it's worth considering someone's financial incentives, which may or may not be 100 percent aligned with your best interests.
Indeed, life advice videos can be a strong marketing tool for creators, who make much of their money via brand deals and affiliate marketing, or an on-ramp to related business pursuits. 'My entire business is from social media,' says Barrett; his clients find him through TikTok and similar platforms. Anderson is currently writing a book of child care and life hacks — she recently left her job at an advertising agency to become a full-time content creator — while Lentz looks at her online presence as a way of building trust and rapport with her audience. She's focused on her corporate career for the time being, but long-term, she would like to run for government office.
Despite the thorniness of navigating advice on the internet — of opening your arms wide to that digital fire hose — there is a certain beauty in the guidance of strangers. 'A stranger and a friend can give the same advice, but when a friend gives it, it's easy to imagine that they have prejudices or limitations or resentments that will prevent them from being objective,' Heather Havrilesky, who has penned the advice column ' Ask Polly ' since 2012, writes to Vox in an email. 'It's easy with a friend to think, 'You're just saying that because you don't understand what it's like to be an artist and you never liked my husband and you think having kids is the most important thing anyone can do.' A stranger has the advantage of dropping down like a god and delivering a verdict without revealing their own prejudices and limitations.'
Havrilesky isn't familiar with TikTok advice, but writing 'Ask Polly' for over a decade seems to have resulted in an approach to counseling strangers that is more complex — messier, perhaps — than what appears in some of those bite-sized videos. She used to feel that other people were usually the problem in her readers' lives: 'The early days were all about encouraging people to stand up for themselves and to refuse to settle for people, places, and things that they tolerated out of guilt, perceived obligation, or compulsive people-pleasing.' Now, she understands that people are generally alike, 'ashamed of their needs and afraid to voice them, afraid to honor themselves, afraid to show their vulnerable hearts.'
Here, as in real life, there are no quick tips, no shortcuts, no magic solutions. Haley Nahman, who writes an advice column for her popular Maybe Baby newsletter, says she is rarely looking to provide answers, but rather to help readers reframe their questions. 'I find that you can wrestle with the wrong question for years,' she says, 'and when you reframe it, it's actually much simpler to answer.'
Havrilesky doesn't attempt to offer a concrete path forward, either. Her goal is to incite catharsis or a perspective shift. She doesn't always know where an answer is going when she begins writing, but while unearthing her own feelings and facing her own fears (because people are generally alike), she ends up harnessing an energy that she hopes to impart to the reader. A bolt of lightning, passed from one hand to another.