The world keeps turning. That’s what advice columns tell me.
the history of advice columns 🗞, part 1
Welcome to Following Studies — an adventure through subcultures, obsessions, the things we follow & the things that follow us. I’m glad you’re here. If you think someone else would have fun hanging out with us, be sure to share.
I’m going to stop promising pieces cause I was all geared up and ready to write more about Llano del Rio when I started reading and then specifically
' piece on eight rules she has when writing her newsletter and thought, GOSH, I LOVE ADVICE PIECES. Tell me what to do, please! Life is chaotic and exhausting, and we’re all wandering around trying to figure out how to handle things. Give me advice, even if it’s wacky, cause sometimes wacky advice is what you need to snap out of whatever wild thing you are about to do or gaslight yourself into thinking is okay. I have a great love for advice columns. They are the help desk of our world. It turns out a whole lot of people love them too. Let’s dive in.
I am obsessed with advice columns on Slate. I don’t even remember when this started, but at some point, I began to noisy around on my phone’s news app and found the treasure trove of advice columns. It makes sense I love the Slate ones - after all, I love
’s Dear Sugar (the column, then podcast, then book, now Substack), and when I used to drive endlessly for work, Dan Savage’s Lovecast was part of my podcast rotation.I’m devoted to Slate’s advice columns. To every kind - the sex one, the parenting one, the Dear Prudence one. I read them obsessively on my phone, moving from one to the other, and because of the eventual paywall that gets thrown up, I pay for a Slate subscription. I read them enough that eventually, I read the same ones again.
Problems range. People are fighting with their neighbors, their kids aren’t getting along, they are having conflict with their parents or their inlaws, they aren’t having enough sex, or they are having too much sex or a kind of sex they aren’t sure about or want a kind of sex they don’t want to ask about. They were young once - weren’t they? They are old now - are they? Their partner is leaving, their partner is staying, they have no help with chores, they feel like they married the wrong person, picked the wrong life, picked the wrong way. They are happy — too happy? They are sad — too sad? Life is exactly what they thought it’d be and it’s boring. Or life is different than they thought it would be, and it’s boring.
The world keeps turning. That’s what advice columns tell me. That somehow, in the isolation of our problems, there is a collective experience. We are all out here in this world trying. There is someone out there that is trudging through precisely the same thing you are, the thing that is making you feel so alien, the thing that is making you feel so alone. Because sometimes, life is so joyful that it feels like you can’t fit it all in your body, and other times, it hurts so deeply that you find depths of yourself you didn’t even know existed.
There’s always going to be someone telling us how to live and that can be annoying but to me advice columns are comforting, they are voyeuristic, they are windows into other people’s problems that are probably similar to mine.
It’s at this moment in writing this piece, I thought: I SHOULD WRITE AN ADVICE COLUMN HERE. This is, after all, my newsletter. What are the rules? There are none! It’s about obsessions and subcultures, and I’m obsessed with advice columns and people-pleasing, which by extension can translate to desperately giving out advice or trying to change circumstances for other people to make them happy! Even at my own expense! I could happily dish out unhinged advice. Bring me your problems and I will deliver answers!
I would just be falling into a long line in the tradition of advice columns. Dr. Spock told us how to raise kids and Dear Abby has been syndicated in countless newspapers, but before them and all the others, there was John Dutton. Dutton was an English publisher that through his newspaper, Athenian Mercury, dolled out advice in the 1690s. The Athenian Mercury was the periodical produced by Dutton’s Athenian Society. At the society’s height, there were four members — all white men, all writing advice of all sorts.
Before Dunton, there was no such thing as advice literature. Its closest approximation was philosophy written as dialogue. Plato originated the form with a series of wide-ranging conversations about love, government, and relationships, most of which feature his mentor, Socrates, replying to his students’ questions. The question-and-answer format is grounding: it turns the philosopher from a high-minded scholar, immersed in a universe of abstractions, into a accessible teacher responding to real-life concerns. (Like nutrition. In one conversation, Socrates recommends a diet heavy in barley, wheat, olives, cheese, and figs.) The conversational format was parroted by many religious scholars and philosophers, such as Cicero and St. Augustine; the Milindapañha, one of the earliest Buddhist texts, was written as a dialouge between a king and a priest. These are not conversations among equals: they are interviews; one person asks the questions, the smarter person responds to them. But there is a sense of trust, of kinship, of being honored to simply be in the room.
- Jessica Weisberg, Asking for a Friend: Three Centuries of Advice on Life, Love, Money, & Other Burning Questions from a Nation Obsessed
Every era has their own advice column craze and the form has shifted, but stayed true to the core: someone asks something, someone answers. The person answering doesn’t neccesarily have to have any qualifications, they just have to be open to saying something, anything, even if it grates.
In today’s social media landscape, even though advice columns (like my beloved Slate) exist, the accessibilty of advice has expanded. For every influencer on Instagram, there is a text box in a story compelling us to ask them a question — any question. We can ask about paint samples, parenting, breastfeeding, where to move, how to live, how to make millions by selling a $7 course. There are a decent amount of etiquette experts on Instagram (and probably TikTok but for my own sanity, I’m not there) telling us how to eat properly (spoiler alert: I’m eating fine but not apparently not excelling at table manners, be warned!). My vice is following them all — for reading the advice even if I don’t take it. For discovering all the ways to exist in this world, even if they aren’t mine.
The world keeps turning for most of us, yes, but it has in fact stopped for a long time for the people of Palestine. This week, I’d like to invite you to donate alongside me to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and to continue to call for a ceasefire.
I loved this so much. x
"Because sometimes, life is so joyful that it feels like you can’t fit it all in your body, and other times, it hurts so deeply that you find depths of yourself you didn’t even know existed."
Oooff this hit me like a ton of bricks. Digging down in the depths of my soul in newsletter format!