"There's plenty more fish in the sea." "Look before you leap." "He who dares wins." These three well-known sayings each have two things in common. First, they're all said so often that its almost as though they're ingrained within our collective psyche from birth. Who can remember the first time they heard the saying "Look before you leap?" Exactly. Secondly, they are all perfectly sound pieces of advice. Each one concisely relays an important, impeccable way of dealing with life, and it is unlikely that, once heard, they'll ever be forgotten.
But for every common piece of good advice there is an equally common, but utterly terrible one. Here are just a few of those.
"Never Apologise."
This spit of rhetoric garbage was foremost a way to handle certain acts of clumsiness that could have legal repercussions. For example, saying 'sorry' at the scene of a car accident instantly renders you the party at fault in the eyes of others and could land you with a hefty fine or worse. And in that respect, there's nothing wrong with that.
But recently, "Never apologise" has made its way into a more common pantheon of advice and is now readily used as a way to help people improve their assertiveness and confidence. But, think about this; people who never apologise are fucking dickheads. It is nigh-on impossible to pass through seventy-plus years on this planet without screwing up at least once, let alone every other month. In the agonisingly long process of trial and error that is life, it is a given that you're a few wrong turns or double measures away for making somebody else's life a complete mess, for however brief a period of time, and if, in all that time, you utterly refuse to apologise, you're going to develop the reputation of a spiteful, heartless bitch. The other week I got quite severely drunk and (as I am regrettably wont to do), lost the people I was with due to nothing more than my own inebriated idiocy. Stupidly jumping to the assumption that my friends had instead abandoned me, I decided to text one of them with a cluster of angry, incoherent F and C bombs. Now, the sort of person I am when pissed notwithstanding, what sort of person would I be if I'd simply held my tongue the following morning and not bothered to say sorry to my friend? I'd quite possibly be at least one friend down at the time of writing, at any rate. Now, this unapologetic way of being is really quite insufferable at any degree of severity. Working in a bar several years ago, a fellow bartender dropped a tray of empty glasses on my foot. It bloody hurt. Want to know how she responded? She looked me squarely in the eye, shrugged and walked off. I imagine she'd been advised to "Never Apologise," by some equally misinformed self-styled sage. Either way, she ended up losing her job not long after. Guess that not apologising thing is really working out for her.
"Rise Above It."
Okay, this one isn't invariably awful as common advice goes, but there are many occasions in life where "rising above it" is, plainly put, the entirely wrong thing to do.
While "Rise above it" can often mean "don't stoop to the level of the immature moron," it can also sometimes mean "let the moron walk all over you." For, sometimes, these morons don't go away just because you've held your tongue. I'm not condoning violent retribution or childish vengeance, but it doesn't always do to internally say "Well, at least I'm not like them," and be done with it. People that unleash their spew of hatred and abuse to an unwavering crowd of people silently "rising above it" are never going to be motivated to stop being dicks. And if word starts to spread that there's no retribution against being a dick, sooner or later there'll be nothing to rise to, in a world of unflapping dicks. Sometimes people need to be stopped, and sometimes that involves dropping slightly closer to their level. Sorry (see what I did there?), but that's the way life works.
"There's Always Someone Worse off Than You."
Or; "You're not allowed to feel down because you're not lying in a pool of feces, simultaneously dying of dysentery and malnutrition while your father gets beheaded for desertion and your mother gets ravaged by the militia."
Not only is this one entirely redundant (is there anybody on Earth, short of the aforementioned, who truly thinks that nobody in human history has ever suffered a trauma worse than their cancelled flight?), but it is also condescending, and indicative of a false-friend who doesn't think you're entitled to feel bad about some things. At best it is innocently misused as an attempt to cheer somebody up, but why exactly is the knowledge that, while you've just been dumped, someone else has just been murdered, a comforting notion? In short, an absurdly high number of seemingly happy people have warped notions on how trauma can be dealt with; they apply a broad, non-variable approach to their suffering loved one when really it should be obvious that mental anguish is as personal and exclusive as emotion gets. Being reminded of the real horrors of the world doesn't placate one's own horror, and that's without even bringing cultural variables into it. For that reason, the complaint "First World Problems," (although not in its most extreme usage) also applies to this list.
"It Gets Better."
The most sickeningly optimistic and baseless piece of prolifically-spewed reassurance ever to befoul the human tongue. Does it get better? Definitely? And you know this how, exactly? Are you Doctor Who?
You know how, when a cancer patient asks a doctor if they'll be cured, the doctor doesn't immediately grin and shout "Yes! And you'll win the lottery, too"? That's because giving people hope when they can't possibly know the outcome of a situation is an act that should remain entirely confined to children's stories. False hope is both a virus and a placebo. It alters impressionable minds toward the delusion that no more bad things are going to happen, and only makes it all the worse when they occasionally do.
There is some semblance of rationale behind the advice; used in a break-up, for example, it is employed with the knowledge that heartbreak doesn't last forever. But what if that person learns that the former love of their life is now pregnant, or was carrying an STD, or is shacking up with their dad? There are too many unpredictable variables that will ultimately render the adage "It gets better" a terrible thing to say.
"You Can't Have Your Cake and Eat it."
Let's be clear - having your cake means keeping it and enjoying its visual attractiveness; it's not another word for eating it, as some misinformed critics of the phrase have assumed. But you can take a photo of the cake, then instagram it so it looks infinitely sexier, then eat it. Yum yum.
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