You are hereby advised to just stop worrying

Actually, all advice is annoying – unless you are the one handing it out

What is the most pointless advice you have received? Mine is: tomorrow is another day. That doesn’t even sound like advice – more like a colourless, odourless fact of life. Of course tomorrow is another day. No one said it was a bicycle or a fish or breakfast. So was yesterday another day (no one hands that out as sane advice), and if you think about it, today is another day too.

I blame Vivien Leigh and Gone with the

Wind. The movie ends with her character Scarlet O’Hara attempting to pack in great profundity into that line. The best response to that, of course, is another line from the same movie, this from Clark Gable’s Rhett Buttler: “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

When I was a boy and left food untouched on the plate, someone, usually my father, would say, “Eat your vegetables. Think of all the people who go hungry…” This is difficult for a seven year old to do. When eating, you do not think of hungry people or even wellfed ones. It is, at that age, an intimate activity that requires your full attention. My son tells me that the most pointless advice I gave him when he was that age was: These things happen (or alternatively, life’s like that). It was a catchall phrase intended to show the variety of misfortunes that could befall a boy, from losing a toy to getting hit by a cricket ball. But it was no consolation to the toyloser or anyone getting hit by a ball.

A recent survey showed that “Just stop worrying” is the most frustrating and futile advice among 42 percent of adults. It is a theme which made the humour magazine Mad such a favourite, with its motto: What, me

Worry? After all, part of the magazine’s remit was to entertain as well as annoy.

Actually, all advice is annoying – unless you are the one handing it out. This is the most important conclusion of the survey. Ninety five percent of those surveyed thought that they gave great advice themselves. Such classics as ‘revenge is sweet’, or ‘forgive and forget’ are at the top of the list.

When someone tells you he has lost his job, his wife has walked out on him and worst of all, his favourite team has been beaten in a World Cup, it is not recommended that you put your arm around him and say, “Just stop worrying.” If that sequence of events does not cut it, then when should a man worry? Nor should you try to cheer him up with either of the Gone With the

Wind lines.

In fact, this may be a good time to remind him that you are unlikely to return the money you owe him or that you just scratched his car accidentally. A small misfortune hides well in a group of large misfortunes. And if he says ‘that’s all right,’ then that’s the best advice you would have heard.

AP Clark Gable, as Rhett Butler and Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara in the 1939 classic, Gone with the Wind.