What commonly given advice is actually wrong or toxic?
11h 22m ago by lemmy.world/u/PhenomenalPancake in asklemmy
"If you don't profit from it, someone else will, so you might as well get yours."
Don't even get me started on how toxic and self-centered this is...
"Work hard and you will be rewarded."
With more work.
My greatest regret in the store I work for, was being reliable.
3 and a half years in, I'm virtually worked to death. And my raise? A petty .25 one.
Yeah, so, anyone who says to me "if you work hard" or "hard work pays off" can royally go fuck themselves dry and hard, unironically.
You've gotten a single 25 cent raise in 3.5 years? Jesus fucking christ. I don't care if you did the bare minimum not to get fired, you deserve more than that. You are making less today than you did when you got hired factoring in inflation. And gesticulates wildly at everything.
Someone with your work ethic should be rewarded with increased compensation. Typically, however, that reward is delivered by taking a new job with a higher pay. Help yourself and go find a new job.
"Arbeit macht frei"
"Get a job doing something you live doing." Only if you want to learn to hate something you loved. Doing anything as work builds resentment, you're better off finding something you can tolerate. Save the stuff you love for hobbies or as a last resort your own business, not working for anyone else.
the secret to "doing what you love" for work is to have a solid passive income stream established beforehand. this takes alot of the stress of failure/eaking out maximum profit out of the equation.
once you make more $ than you really need to spend, you can work as little/many hours at whatever type of job you want.
rich people are rich because somewhere down the line their parents bought/passed down dividend paying stock (or they got lucky themselves/soldout a startup for some etc.). once you bring in 6 figs in passive income you can pretty much do whatever the fuck you want as long as you don't try to keep appearances with the super-rich.
that is what all those "i weave baskets and my partner rehabilitates wild dolphins for a living, watch us shop for a 2-3 million $ house"-shows quietly never touch on.
Eh yeah, that scenario is doing wonders with the millions who're forced into paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyles. /s You might want to tone it down a few notches there.
Rich people are rich because they're cunning and well-connected, other times, it is just the birthing lottery.
Better advice would be to find a job that is enjoyable.
My work is still work, but as jobs go it's fucking awesome ... it's not what I love, but there's lots of variety, I have to use my head and body, and it's legit so I don't have to worry about being arrested or catching an STD or whatever.
Get a job doing something you like doing.
I liked being in a van all day a lot more than I liked being inside all day.
Even when the weather was terrible, it's better than rebreathing the same stale air for eight hours.
For me I think growing up constantly told “you’re so smart, you’ll figure it all out” was more detrimental than helpful. It led me to believe I’d cruise through life pretty easily. I’m happy with where life’s taken me and the point I’m at now but I could’ve gotten there a lot faster if I would’ve applied myself more. Just because a kid is into computers doesn’t mean they’ll be some sort of genius.
I can't stand this one. Like, yes, I can figure out a lot of things for myself. But if I'm asking someone for help, it's because my own resourcefulness has reached its limit and in this situation, I need assistance from others. That is, if I could figure out a solution on my own, I would've done so. The whole point of bringing up the issue was an attempt to get help for it.
"Blood is thicker than water" meaning family is more important than chosen relationships.
And before any smartypants claims it used to mean something else, there is no evidence of that.
Anything cited from Reddit shouldn't be taken with grains of salt, but with bags of salt.
Irrespective if the meaning has been reversed over the years.
What most people miss about this saying is... IT GOES BOTH WAYS.
If someone mistreats you and uses their blood relationship to you as an excuse, then that is not a member of your family. Family supports and goes through things together. Friends can become family. At this stage of my life, I have cut off my entire blood relations due to their toxic and stupid behavior. My family is the woman I married, my kids, and a few choice friends.
its such dumb phrase too. "blood is thicker than water" well no way, it is?! And why is water representing the chosen relationships here and why is the thickness the implied positive thing here? You know what is thicker than blood? Porridge. No idea what that implies though. If you need someone to explain the meaning of saying to get it, then its not very good saying imo.
"Don't care what other people think about you"
Sounds like permission to be an asshole.
I understand what it's trying to say, but assholes don't mind borrowing the mantra.
I get what you're trying to share, which makes a lot of sense, but now reframe it in a different context (just an hypothesis, obviously not an affirmation) : you live surrounded by assholes (say, racists ones), should you mind what they think about you (not being a racist)?
if you care what people think about you, you become a masked compliant normie
(masked as in masking autism/adhd/etc and ICE)
Good things come to those who wait.
You can be anything you want.
The man who stands atop a hill with his mouth open will wait a long time for a roast duck to fly in
"She's your mother! Show some respect" <- friends and family after every toxic, manipulative, narcissistic thing that woman did. The eternal free pass.
Samesies.
She had 4 kids. I was the middle one until the last one came about 15 years later than most of us, with a different dad.
Didn't care much after that. I moved out at 15 to my dads.
You know how it's a meme and whatnot that parents always want you into the best schools possible? Well I had basically an above 9 GPA on a 4-10 scale in the best school in the country and my mom pulled me out to put me in some rural cousinfucker school because she wanted to move because she met a wealthy man and they couldn't wait two fucking years while not living together. Despite the drive being like an hour between them.
Literally had a teacher in that school tell me I could be a surgeon, when I was the first in a decade to extract a perch's swimbladder without puncturing it.
To this day mom won't even talk about it. And if she does she basically just avoids taking any responsibility, saying "everyone makes their own choices". Well bitch, I was underage. You were making them for me.
And she's supposedly a college level graduate social worker, which just adds to the irony.
"Be yourself" in regards to dating.
I don't know about most people, but I was an absolute asshat in my twenties.
If I had to rephrase that for myself, it would be to read a bunch of books, work out, and learn to be more socially acceptable so people can tolerate my stupid ass and actually want to date me.
(fyi that was like two decades ago and I'm happily married with two kids. )
I would re-tool it as "be a better version of yourself" instead. So, sounds like you practiced that method than the vague one.
I like that a lot! Thank you!
I'd rephrase it to "be your best self" ... you know that you can take better care of your appearance, ask attentive questions, chew with your mouth closed, etc.
It's a question of effort.
To me it means be genuine vs being fake. Acting like someone you aren't to get a partner only results in having a partner that you don't have a real connection with, and who values you for qualities you don't actually have.
Well yes ... but I've met many men who, when being themselves, were simply putting in zero effort. And they were oblivious to it.
Sometimes it takes someone to come in from outside and give them a shove jn the right direction.
Absolutely this. I currently know a guy who is a fully grown adult who loves Asmongold and flips out at why he can't get a girl to look at him.
This is a double edged sword. You shouldn't put a ton of effort into your dating self if you're not prepared to keep that up for the rest of your life, otherwise you're just screwing your spouse. I'm so so glad I put very little effort into masking/ lying about who I am when I dated my spouse. I was just honest. I hate cooking. I'm hard to get ahold of/ don't answer messages quickly. I don't want to own a dog. Now that we're 7 years in, I don't have to let him down by saying a dog is too much housekeeping for me. I told him that on date 2. He on the other hand definitely presented his best foot, which was disappointing 5 years in when he could no longer keep it up. He's messy, he apparently really wants a dog, and he also hates cooking, none of which i knew until long after we married.
Yes, absolutely.
The mature thing is to recognise that you don't want to live in a dirty home and smell bad ... and to realise that means you need to put in half the effort needed to accomplish that (assuming a partnership of two people under one roof)
"Be yourself. And then make sure "yourself" is someone people want to be around."
This one is hard because it also depends on what "you" (the person receiving this information) considers is good.
I think about the manosphere and those frail babies are surrounded by ego cucks.
“If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”. Your silence in the face of injustice is what enables abuse.
Yeah and now people cant handle a reality check, and I'm the asshole for giving one rather than reflecting on what they did wrong
- Money doesn’t buy happiness. YES IT DOES
- Everything happens for a reason. Yeah sure and the reasons are because of someone’s action or inaction. There is no all knowing benevolent deity effecting things in our lives.
Money buys stability, not happiness. The second you get savings you start worrying about it. The more money you get the bigger prick you seemingly become. It's like the second you can afford a BMW the switch flips to being a public asshole. Get the high score and you get to be an absolutely miserable billionaire. Show me a truly happy billionaire whose jollies don't come from hurting everyone around them.
No.. it buys me all types of happiness.
I'd say that people often misunderstand the "Money can't buy happiness" thing. I think the saying should be "Money BY ITSELF can't buy happiness." Happiness is bought by being smart with the resources you have. There are happy poor people and miserable rich people because even though money helps, it's not the main deciding factor as to whether or not you'll be happy, it's your decisions and personal mental framework.
Below a certain threshold, it is a big deciding factor. Doesn't matter your outlook if you can't afford to go to the doctor, or eat healthy foods.
Everyone returns to their baseline happiness 3 months after something big happens, but when you're poor, hard things happen more often than every three months.
Just ignore them.
Try telling that to someone who is being physically afflicted.
It also sends a message that there's no point in bringing up things that bother you. A kid raised on "just ignore them" may internalize that they shouldn't talk about their problems, since nobody's going to help them anyway. Then someday they may end up in a work force where they don't bring up issues to management that could totally be resolved with a simple conversation. Worse yet, if they have a beef with someone and the other person speaks to management first, they'll immediately be put on the defense simply because they didn't say anything sooner.
One of the worst, isn't it? Blaming the victim in advance.
He's just looking for attention. Paying attention to him makes him do more of the thing he's already doing, so if he's doing a thing and you're paying attention, it's actually your fault now because circular reasoning works because circular reasoning works.
"If you didn't hear back about the application, reach out to the company/recruiter/interviewer." - they're either not into you or swamped trying to get things lined up to move forward or both. Either way they don't want to hear from you because you're not getting it or they are working on it. Just pretend you didn't get it and move on.
"Personalize your cover letter for each job application." - no one has read that shit in years--and that was before AI slop started doing them all for people---and good companies don't ask for them anymore as it's cruel to waste applicants time on them.
"Ask for what you're worth in the interview/during a promotion/counteroffer!" - this one comes with an asterix as it's not always terrible advice, but well-run orgs gave a budget for your role, know what the job generally pays for the skills it requires and can't go much outside of it at all or they'll create pay equity issues which is against the law in most states if not federally, depending. I say all that and close by saying most companies aren't well run, so they're just trying to save money, but some are actually working withing a good system so don't take it personally if they don't or can't offer you more.
"Buy experiences, not things"
The rationale isn't exactly wrong for the comparison, but it smuggles in an underlying assumption that it's reasonable and normal to be spending all your available money in an effort to be happy. Money is way more useful for reinforcing your continued survival and freedom than for anything else and the idea that it's good for regulating your emotions beyond that is a deception geared towards keeping consumer spending up.
I was also never sure how to separate "things" from "experiences." Is a fancy cocktail while I'm on a beach vacation a thing or an experience? If I buy a new table saw for my hobby woodshop is that a thing or a experience?
We don't normally buy things and then bury them in a hole in the ground. We buy them because we intend to use them, even if that use is just for decoration. Our things enable experiences, and our experiences require things.
The line between thing and experience has always been very blurry to me.
Peeing on a jellyfish sting. It doesn't do anything, except maybe humiliate a person who's already in pain.
That's my kink.
Some people will pay for this service...
Is this really common advice?
"Just rub some dirt in it, you'll be fine"
Ah yes, introduce who knows what kind of bacteria, possible fecal matter and foreign material into an open wound and be surprised when it gets infected.
I'll admit, I did this as a kid many times but that doesn't mean it's a good idea
I've never heard that as advice, where is it common?
Must be a place with lots of infections happening!
US, specifically in the country. Fall off your bike and scrape your knee, rub some dirt in it and keep going, for example.
While I grew up hearing this advice, I don’t remember anyone taking it literally. Even as a little one I always understood it to mean the same as “walk it off”, also not entirely literal.
What they really meant was the more literal and toxic “don’t just cry like a baby “
Oh no where I grew up it was very literal, my parents said it and even teachers when kids fell on the playground at school.
"Slam your weenie in a kitchen drawer for fun."
Don't know how many times I've heard it through the years. It's actually not very fun at all, though.
I have to think whoever downvoted this must have tried it out ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip56srPPq0I
Use AI.
Old & busted: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
New hotness: do unto others as they would have you do unto them.
"Crime doesn't pay"
Tell that to the companies which get a few million in fines for stealing tens of millions in wages.
Crime doesn't pay when you're not protected by privilege and status.
Idk man I've been making pretty good money out of growing weed and am not protected. Even with the occasional bust, it's still a net plus.
"You need to vote to make a difference"
And watch as the electoral college comes in going "FUCK YOUR POPULAR VOTE, BRUH, WE'RE DOING THIS BY POINTS AND WHATEVER SHITTY POLITICIAN HAS THE MOST POINTS, AUTO WINS!".