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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • All advice is good advice in a certain situation. “Trust your gut”/“be skeptical”, “be careful”/“go for it!” all of these can be good or terrible advice for different people at different times.

    The problem with “just do it” is it’s often literally the first thing that everyone tries. If I want to do my homework or cook a healthy meal, it’d be pretty weird if I started off by trying to not do it. So, often when it’s given as advice it feels very insulting, because it feels like your being literally told “have you considered doing the thing your trying to do?”

    It can be shorthand for much better advice - “don’t think about the consequences or costs, just focus on this moment and the first step you need to take” or whatever, but when delivered to someone who is literally struggling to do something it often adds nothing. “be careful” is good advice if someone’s carelessly approaching a dangerous, delicate task, but is shitty, vacuous advice if someone is already being very careful. So telling someone to “just do it” suggests you think that they weren’t previously attempting to do it, and that can give offense.