Abundance of advice, scarcity of encouragement

A couple of days ago I wrote a rant about inaccurate use of certain words.

This made me look hunting for other words and dichotomies between them and while reading James' Dyson autobiography Invention, I found one important enough to write an entire post about. Here is the fragment:

[…] The failures began to excite me. ‘Wait a minute, that should have worked, now why didn’t it?’ I was scratching my head, mystified, but then had another idea for an experiment that might lead to solving the problem. I was usually covered in dust, getting deeper and deeper into debt, yet happy and absorbed. Fortunately, my wife, Deirdre, allowed me to put our house and home life at risk, while the bank was kind enough to lend us money. She and our children never expressed doubt about what I was doing every day. They offered encouragement, love and understanding. Without that I would have given up. The same is true of every one of our friends. They must have thought I was mad and wasting my time, leading my family into penury. They never said so. Instead, they supported us and gave the unstinting encouragement without which I also doubt I could have lasted the course. They are true and close friends.

First of all, let's acknowledge that we drown in advice - Lex Fridman asks his guests for a piece of advice during every interview and there are dedicated podcasts that deal with "optimizing" your life. LinkedIn is the epitome, an embodiment of the industry of advice; it is effectively an ideal training ground for GPT-3-advice bot.

I am not a huge fan of giving and receiving advice myself - if I got $0.01 for each piece of advice I heard, I would be a very rich man now; at the same time, if I applied every single one of them into my life, I would be a torn-apart man. Following advice leads to a memetic mess in my head, with all these memes pulling apart my unitary self into all the directions, resulting in 0 action.

Sure, it probably makes sense for you to finish school, but for some it can be net negative.

Encouragement is much more harder to find though - out of curiosity, I searched for the popularity of these two words in Google Ngram Viewer.

It confirms my notion that there is much more advice than encouragement out there and that this gap has increased over time - I don't know enough Ngram to draw any major conclusions, but it feels like it to me. It is also interesting that the word advice and inspiration went up during the last 30 years whereas encouragement has had a negative trendline.
My take is that a huge part of this trend is because advice can be capitalized on - books can be written, podcasts can be recorded.

Advice is many things: it needs to be generic enough to be spread around, hence it is inherently memetic - it is based on someone else's success, it is based on the already known path. Advice is a product of the Age of Socratic theoretical man, it is its signum temporis - trying to compress into words what worked for someone else in the past. Advice is also rational; it is about some known gain.

Encouragement is the very opposite - it is personal and it is anti-mimetic as it is basically about your calling: follow your instinct, gut feeling, intelligence-at-large. It doesn't scale, it cannot be monetized. Think about it - you don't take encouragement from anyone as you need a certain degree of empathy, emotional closeness and developed trust. Since it reinforces the inner calling, encouragement is also mystical - it adds hope to this world.

I compiled what I have just said into a table, to show that I view these two concepts as polar opposites:

On a positive note - since we all have one short life, I encourage you to be yourself, to follow your calling. This is not a piece of advice.