For millions of years, the single most important resource to the human race has been the newspaper. Whether it’s the New York Times uncovering secret military programs that investigate potential extraterrestrial threats or USA Today’s effectiveness as kindling for bonfires, the ways in which newspapers have been useful are innumerable. But there’s no way in which the format has proven to be more vital to the survival of our species than in the advice column, which is why I’m thrilled to introduce the new and very very very important one you’re reading: The Bad Advice Column.
Now this advice column will work very similar to all the other bullshit ones you’ve ever seen. If you have a problem or issue in your life that you are struggling to resolve, write in to badadvice@citybeat.com, in as much detail as possible, the full details of your dilemma, and if I find the predicament interesting or weird or stupid enough, I will respond to it with advice on how to navigate your conundrum (I’m running out of synonyms here).
But, here’s the catch.
While most columns provide practical and sometimes heartfelt solutions on how to solve your issues, I will instead be providing you with the worst fucking advice you’ve ever heard in your entire fucking life. It will be advice so bad that no reasonable person would ever think they have actually been offered a viable solution to whatever it is that is preventing them from moving ahead in life. This column will be filled with suggestions so obviously stupid and bad that even your uncle with the goatee and American flag trucker hat might second guess its wisdom.
So now you might be thinking: What’s the point of even submitting my problem then? Why bother being that open and vulnerable in the first place if you’re not even going to provide me with a sensible solution?
Well, the point is that sometimes the worst advice is the best advice. How many times has a friend given you advice so terrible that you immediately got clarity on how to solve your own problem? Well, this column works the same way, especially for those issues you’d rather express anonymously because you don’t want anyone in your life to know how big of a freak you really are. Sometimes it’s simply more helpful to be told what not to do, than it is to be told exactly how to think and behave by some prick who thinks they know your life better than you do.
And who even are these columnists who think they have all the answers in the first place? There’s no one on the planet who understands your problem better than you do, so there’s no one better equipped to solve it than yourself. Sometimes all you need is a push in the absolute wrong direction to help you feel better about moving toward the right one. That sounds somewhat believable, right? Maybe?
It should be telling that the single most famous piece of advice column writing was an inquiry as to whether or not Santa Claus is real. I don’t want to tell you what the answer was in case some awesome 6-year-old is somehow reading the newspaper instead of being raised by an iPad, but the columnist definitely lied (sorry if this is how you’re finding out, Virginia). And when these columnists are not fibbing about mythical capitalist creations designed to sell more Keurigs at Target, they’re almost always providing solutions that the reader was clearly trying to avoid in the first place. Everyone already knows that the best way to introduce a secret pinecone fetish into the bedroom is to address the issue with your partner directly, Dan Savage!
So what makes me the most qualified person to give you the worst advice you’ve ever heard? Well, I have a degree in mass communications for one thing. That should tell you a lot right there about my experience in bad decision-making. And it took me six or seven years to get that degree from a college that even I have barely heard of. I even failed the same psychology class twice and was just too lazy to take it a third time.
And that’s just school. There is not a major area in life that I do not have some insight into how to completely fuck up, be it your career, money, marriage, kids, health, sex life, etc. I promise I am in no way qualified to counsel anyone or give them any type of advice that may improve the quality of their own life, but I am absolutely qualified to counsel you on how to make it worse, which sometimes is all one needs to hear to start making it better.
Right? Sure. So, c’mon and send me your unsolvable problem at badadvice@citybeat.com. What’s the worst thing that could happen? I’ll be sure to let you know.
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This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 12, 2024.