Have we all lost our intuition?

Welcome to the era of peak advice

- Anna Cafolla

From agony aunts of yore to forums, podcasts and TikTokers, everyone online is here to tell you how to live your life. All you have to do is...try not to panic spiral. For Ella, 26, a writer from Manchester, when something goes wrong in her life, the reflex is to scroll Reddit. When she broke up with her partner of seven years, she found solace in the diversity of opinions and experiences shared on the platform. “The problem is,” Ella tells me, “I then have a reaction to too much choice. I never know where to focus and struggle to sit with ‘not knowing’, so I'll turn to another platform for more opinions, and then another.” Instagram Reels and TikTok have also become crutches. When social media isn’t delivering an answer? “Sometimes I'll forward the same voicenote to several friends seeking their input,” she admits. After all this digital soul searching, Ella feels she has lost her intuition.

Ella is far from the only person using the Internet in this way. With 24/7 access to a swathe of opinions and our concerns protected by the cloak of digital anonymity, social media is a free-for-all of self-proclaimed experts promising to cure us of our every ailment if we just listen to them. Everywhere we turn (and however long we scroll), there’s somebody proffering their ‘expertise’: how to find love, to ask for a pay rise, train a puppy, deal with being ghosted, even how to cook a steak. The world’s two cents is the algorithm’s currency, and the advice provided traverses relationships, romance, money, and health—all universal but deeply personal issues. Consuming it can make us feel less isolated in our struggles, which is why advice remains such a buoyant genre.