Consider, if you haven’t already had the pleasure, this: https://blog.growth.supply/advice-from-30-year-old-me-to-20-year-old-me-b9b035d39e2d.
It’s a piece by Nic Haralambous, a hirsute luxury sock-seller from Cape Town, entitled ‘Advice from 30-year-old me to 20-year-old me’. A list of 11 life lessons he’d like to share with his younger self, it’s been recommended over 6,500 times since Nic hit the publish button back in May 2014. Which is a lot.
There’s just one problem and, at the risk of antagonizing the many people who seem to have enjoyed the read, the problem is this: the article is… well, it’s crushingly insubstantial.
Example: this paragraph from his list of millennial top-tips, about the benefits of reading:
3) Read: Read every day. Read everything you can. Don’t just read about things you know about. Read about people. Read people.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of reading. But I can’t help questioning the level of insight here. There are probably tens of millions of 30-somethings who could have conjured this anodyne piece of pseudo-wisdom, and articulated it better. Yet here is Nic, with the blogger’s longed-for virality, all for 700 words of intellectually lightweight condescension.
