The next time someone leans across the table and tells you, “Never go into business with friends,” listen for the ghost in their voice. It is not a slogan they copied from a self-help carousel; it is the echo of a Thanksgiving that still tastes like ashes, the memory of a handshake that came apart in their palm like wet paper. Advice is almost never a statement of universal law. It is a weather report from a storm the speaker once stood in without an umbrella.
We like to think wisdom arrives on marble tablets, but it usually shows up as a limp. The uncle who swears that “a boat is just a hole in the water you throw money into” is speaking from a summer when he bailed every dawn, watching his savings gurgle out through a cracked transom. The colleague who insists you should “always negotiate salary” once accepted the first number offered and spent the next two years replaying the conversation in the shower, perfecting the comeback that never came. Their certainty feels like preaching; it is actually scar tissue itching in the rain.
This is why unsolicited advice lands so clumsily. The giver has forgotten that what they are handing over is not a flashlight but a bruise. They see a stranger walking toward the same rake they once stepped on, and they yell “duck” without remembering that the stranger hasn’t even seen the handle yet. The stranger only hears the shout, not the garden it grew in.
There is generosity in the impulse, though, if we learn to hear the biography inside it. When my neighbor tells me to plant marigolds around the tomato patch, she is not trying to landscape my life; she is remembering the summer her own tomatoes yellowed and died while her husband was in the hospital. The marigolds are her love letter to a version of herself who needed small, bright things to survive the nights. If I accept the advice, I am also accepting stewardship of her memory. The flowers I tuck into my soil become a quiet continuation of her story.The same is true in reverse. When I tell a younger friend to quit the job that makes her cry on Sunday evenings, I am not dispensing corporate strategy. I am sending a telegram to the twenty-four-year-old I used to be, the one who believed loyalty meant letting panic ring in her ears like church bells. I cannot rescue her retroactively, but I can stand at the intersection of my past and her future, waving both arms until she chooses a different turn. My advice is a postcard signed, “Wish I had gone.”
Recognizing the personal archaeology beneath every suggestion does not mean we have to obey it. It simply means we stop arguing with ghosts. Instead of countering “Well, actually, I read an article that says—” we can say, “That must have hurt,” and feel the temperature shift. The conversation turns from courtroom to campfire. Sometimes the other person will exhale a breath they have been holding since the day the thing actually happened, and the advice dissolves into the story it always was. We walk away lighter, carrying neither their prescription nor our rebuttal, only the shared knowledge that every counsel is a scab over someone else’s bleeding.
So the next time you feel the urge to dismiss a warning as cliché, picture the moment it was earned. Someone somewhere once boarded a plane, opened a credit card, said “I do,” or pressed “send,” and the world cracked open. What you are hearing is the sound they made while gluing the pieces back together. You don’t have to take the advice; just acknowledge the fracture. Do them the courtesy of recognizing that they are not trying to run your life—only trying to keep their past from repeating itself on your body.