When Did Everyone Become an Expert on Your Life?

A Letter from the Host.

We have never had access to more advice about how to live. So why does it sometimes feel harder to hear ourselves think?

You can barely open your phone now without somebody telling you what you should be doing differently.

A psychologist you've never met explains why your choice of partner is probably an attachment wound. A nutritionist tells you the breakfast you've eaten happily for twelve years is causing a glucose spike. A woman standing in a beautiful kitchen tells you that waking up at 5.30am changed her life. Somebody else says absolutely not, sleep is sacred. One person tells you to push through discomfort; another tells you that discomfort is your nervous system begging you to stop.

Then there is dating advice. Career advice. Parenting advice. Money advice. Skincare advice. Friendship advice. Advice about boundaries, hormones, ageing, manifestation, protein, cortisol, trauma, productivity and whether you should ever send a man a second text.

Spend twenty minutes online and you can come away with the slightly alarming impression that you've been living your entire life incorrectly.

The strange thing is, a lot of the advice isn't necessarily bad.

Some of it is excellent.

There is simply so much of it.

Advice used to require asking

That feels like quite an important distinction.

There was a time when, if something was troubling you, you might call somebody. You'd tell a friend what happened and ask what she thought. You might speak to your mother, your sister, your doctor, somebody at work. You chose the person because you trusted them, and they knew something about the life in which the problem was actually happening.

Now advice often arrives before we've even decided we have a problem.

You watch one video about feeling tired and suddenly the algorithm has assembled a multidisciplinary team.

By lunchtime, your tiredness may be burnout, low iron, high cortisol, perimenopause, a dysregulated nervous system, insufficient protein, unresolved trauma or evidence that you're living out of alignment with your authentic self.

Perhaps you're also just tired.

This isn't an argument against learning about ourselves. Quite the opposite. Women having greater access to information about their bodies, relationships, money and mental health is enormously valuable.

But access to information and being constantly assessed by information are not quite the same thing.

And sometimes I wonder whether we've forgotten that distinction.

Everything has acquired a name

There is something reassuring about finding language for an experience.

You discover a phrase and think, Oh. That's what that was.

Language can make us feel less alone. It can help us recognise patterns that genuinely need attention. It can allow people to describe experiences they previously couldn't explain.

But there is another side to it.

Sometimes ordinary human behaviour gets put through the internet and comes back sounding like a diagnosis.

Someone doesn't reply to your message and they're avoidant.

Your colleague takes credit for something and they're a narcissist.

You don't want to attend a dinner and you're protecting your peace.

You feel nervous before doing something difficult and your nervous system is dysregulated.

A friend disagrees with you and suddenly you're being gaslit.

Sometimes these words are absolutely the right words.

Sometimes your colleague is simply a bit of an arsehole.

We seem increasingly uncomfortable allowing an experience to remain messy, ordinary and unexplained. Everything needs a category. A framework. A reason.

Perhaps because a label gives us the comforting feeling that we know what to do next.

Real life is rarely that tidy.

The internet doesn't know the whole story

This becomes particularly obvious with relationships.

A woman writes: My husband did this. What do you think?

Within minutes, strangers who know perhaps six sentences about a fifteen-year relationship are advising her to leave it.

Someone posts about a difficult mother and the comments fill with instructions to go no-contact.

A friend cancels twice and we're told to stop giving access to people who don't respect our time.

Again, sometimes leaving is exactly right. Sometimes distance is necessary. Sometimes the comments see something the person living inside it hasn't been able to see yet.

But sometimes people are complicated.

Sometimes a good husband behaves badly.

Sometimes a loving mother says something infuriating.

Sometimes a wonderful friend is going through something she hasn't told you about.

Sometimes you are the difficult person in somebody else's story.

Context matters. History matters. Love matters.

What happened before the thing you're telling us matters.

What happened afterwards matters.

And almost none of that fits comfortably into a sixty-second video.

Perhaps certainty is what sells

Nuance is not particularly good at getting our attention.

It depends is rarely an exciting headline.

Neither is I don't know enough about your life to tell you.

Certainty is much more compelling.

Five signs you need to leave.

Three things emotionally intelligent people never do.

If he wanted to, he would.

There is something delicious about a sentence that makes the world suddenly feel simple.

I've certainly believed a few of them.

But most meaningful decisions don't arrive with that kind of clarity. They involve competing truths. You can love somebody and know the relationship isn't right. You can have a wonderful career and desperately want to leave it. You can adore your children and need time away from them. You can be grateful for your life and still want something different.

Two things can be true at once.

The internet doesn't always have much patience for that.

Life requires quite a lot of it.

And then there is the advice we give ourselves

This may be the sneakiest part.

After consuming enough advice, eventually we don't need anybody else to tell us what we should be doing.

We take over.

You should be exercising. You should be saving more. You should be further ahead. You should be healing. You should have better boundaries.

You should drink less, sleep more, stretch, journal, meditate, meal prep, read before bed, spend less time on your phone and somehow maintain meaningful friendships while being completely present with your family.

It's an impressive workload.

Particularly when many of us already have actual jobs.

No wonder self-improvement can become exhausting. There is always another area of yourself available for renovation.

What do you think?

It is such an ordinary question.

Perhaps that's why we don't ask it enough.

Before searching. Before polling the group chat. Before watching another video. Before asking somebody who has never met you to explain your own life back to you.

What do I think?

Not what should I think. Not what would the healthiest, most evolved, securely attached version of me think.

You.

What do you already know?

There may not be an immediate answer. In fact, there often isn't. Sometimes we need information. Sometimes we need therapy. Sometimes we absolutely need another person's perspective because we're too close to something to see it clearly.

But there is a difference between asking for help and outsourcing your judgement.

And perhaps we need to be careful not to do the latter simply because there are now thousands of people available to tell us what they would do.

They aren't living your life.

You are.

Maybe we need fewer answers

At Room to Restore, we talk about Emotional Hospitality as creating somewhere a woman can arrive without immediately being treated as a problem to solve.

I think this is part of it too.

Not every conversation needs to end with instructions.

Sometimes somebody needs to say, Tell me what happened.

Then listen.

Sometimes we need enough quiet to hear the thought underneath all the other voices.

Perhaps that's why the question matters more than the answer.

What do you think?

What feels true to you?

What happens when you remove the audience, the algorithm, the expert, the comments and the imaginary panel of people evaluating whether you're doing life correctly?

There you are.

You might still ask for advice afterwards.

You might even ignore your own answer.

We're human. We do that.

But at least give yourself the courtesy of asking.

You have, after all, been there for the whole story.

From our house to yours.