Me: having a hard time mentally and emotionally Someone: "You need to pray to God to make your troubles go away."

My dad threw a party to celebrate when I graduated university with a degree in Computer Science.

At the party, my dad's friend took me aside and said "My nephew just got a degree in electrical engineering. Now that's an up and coming field, you should get a degree in that."

Like, alright buddy. Hopefully that career pays well enough for another four years of student debt. I'm still kinda in shock at how dumb of a thing to say that was.

Don't ever quit.

Screw that. Quitting is healthy, quitting is good. Nothing worse than digging yourself deeper and deeper based on sunk cost fallacy.

I was a new dog owner, went to /r/Dogs to ask about a particular behavior my dog was exhibiting I'd never seen or read about before (turned out to be normal tho) and every reply I got basically told me I don't know how to care for an animal and that I should give him to someone else.

It was then I realized that it wasn't just /r/RelationshipAdvice that was full of bitter, jealous losers whose advice is always "dump them." It applied to literally every single subreddit dedicated to advice. They may have started with good intentions and knowledgeable people, but over time filled up with people who had no business giving anyone advice.

Someone told me that if I wanted to be a history teacher I should get a degree in special Ed to "make myself more marketable." It took 14 years to get out of special education and land a job teaching history

"You just have to work through the pain." I've injured myself multiple times in the past exercising by following this idiotic advice.

It's one thing to push through discomfort, that's how your body gets stronger. But If you're in actual pain, stop and listen to the alarm bells your body is giving you.

"sleep when the baby sleeps"

Yeah because there's absolutely nothing that needs to be done once I finally get my daughter down. No washing and sterilising, for prep for us or for her, general chores around the house which you can never do effectively one handed. And fuck me if I wanted to try and relax and have an actual evening after they're down too.

"Sleeping like a baby" had also never seemed like such a juxtaposition!

That since I was pregnant it was time to let my career go.

My career is critical to my family’s ability to live a middle class life (and it’s critical to my sanity and happiness, but the person who gave me this “advice“ wasn’t really one for acknowledging or valuing mental health).

When talking to someone about mental illness: "You know it's all in your head right?"

“Everything happens for a reason”

• technically correct, completely unhelpful.

“God doesn’t give you more than you can handle”

• Fuck. Off.

My mother once told us to get "a male realtor; the woman realtors don't care as much because they're just doing it as a hobby - the men are doing it as their full time job."

She's a real gem.

“Get into the housing market while you can.”

My brother, mid 2005.

"There are people worse off than you"

Thanks, that totally solves my problem.

What is the most unhelpful advice you have received?

• "They're your family so you have to maintain a relationship with them'
• "man up"
• attend church

The usual acne related ones, like washing my face more or using tooth paste on my spots. Turns out clearasil won't fix your hormones.

Use olive oil instead of sun screen because it works better than SPF and isn't full of chemicals.

When taking a taxi on a short stop over in Dubai, the taxi driver told me not to have blue hair (which I had) or no man will ever want me, while my then boyfriend was also sitting in the taxi, masquerading as my husband (we were wearing rings and just letting people assume we were married, which everyone did. Including the taxi driver!)

Work related: don't make my code too "complicated" or my one coworker can't understand it (read: my coworker doesn't know what async means, and instead of him learning, I'm just not ever meant to do anything async... When processing huge amounts of data... Also, error handling is too hard, don't do that either) yes, I will forever be salty about this. He deleted weeks worth of work while I had covid because he didn't even try to understand it - his reasoning being "it doesn't work anyway, so there's no point in understanding or learning what I'm doing"

When I used to make notes because I don't retain information instantly my boss said "Just don't forget" I exclaimed: "Thanks, I'm cured!" The office got a laugh but it still bothers me that he thought it was a choice