“I Don’t Know Who Needs to Hear This”: The Advice Dispensation Industrial Complex and Why I Hate it

I have a friend who’s a midwife and she said there’s a new wave of patients who come in with very specific birthing lingo and they show up asking for things as if they’re choosing a birthing strategy from a mail order catalog. The issue is that much of what they’re asking for, which they have invariably learned from tik tok videos, is complex, the sort of thing she might have spent a year of her PhD researching and learning about the nuances of. Of course she wants to give her patients what they want and feel comfortable with, but sometimes their knowledge is so limited that they don’t know that they’re asking for two contradictory things, or using a term completely wrong or out of context or asking for something that’s just a standard part of the labor process that they would have experienced anyway. But a tik toker has so convincingly pointed at the air words to explain in one minute why they need to ask their doctor for X type of birth, that they’re convinced that a stranger on the internet, giving generalized advice, has somehow pinpointed the exact thing that they need. I’m not trying to criticize the democratization of information that has undoubtedly come with the rise of the internet, but rather to point out a certain loss of nuance and specificity that has come with that. My friend’s patient may have been watching tik tok videos that were made by another doctor or midwife, but the maker of the video was not her doctor or midwife. What we lose when we universalize medical or mental health advice is the very important step of being treated like an individual with a story, a medical history, and a value system unique to us. Once again, there’s a clear red arrow pointing to all the problems with our healthcare system which make many of us feel that we have no choice but to use tik tok to solicit advice rather than reading a book, going to a doctor, or talking to a trusted friend about our experiences. And perhaps at the root of that is the fact that our healthcare system also fails to acknowledge that we are individuals with stories, medical histories, and value systems unique to us. Nonetheless I’m still not convinced that viral tik tok videos are the solution to the problem.  

I’m not trying to say that nothing good has come out of people sharing knowledge on the internet or creating communities around specific identity points, health issues, parenting struggles, neurological differences, and the like. I know that these are, in fact, some of the more positive things that have come out of social media. I suppose what I’m suspicious of is the growing popularity of  dispensing advice in a black and white “why you should____” format and the algorithm clearly favoring that format over other, less reductive ones. We seem to crave the simplicity of being told what to do and telling others what to do. I have found myself, after seeing this format so much, feeling the urge to re-create it myself. Do I make a video about why, like me, you should not buy a house right now? About how to read more books or go for more walks or turn your hobby into a career? Yes, I value and have some experience doing these things and making these choices, but why would I feel compelled to share them in a way that universalizes my experience and distills it into a how-to guide rather than a simple reflection on why I do what I do and how I feel about it? This would arguably be a more relational and community minded approach than simply telling people how to be like me.