I need you to take a second for me.
Now, think about the last time you made a decision - completely by yourself. I don't mean a massive life choice like changing careers or buying a house.
I mean something beautifully small and mundane. The way you fried your eggs this morning. The direction you blended your bronzer. The frequency with which you watered the fern sitting in the corner of your living room.
Chances are, a tiny, spectral voice from your FYP whispered an instruction to you while you did it.
No matter what niche of the internet you inhabit, whether you are on Fitness TikTok, Interior Design Instagram, or Culinary YouTube, you are being subjected to an unrelenting barrage of absolute certainty. Everyone is a self-appointed expert. Everyone is treating their highly specific, completely unverified method as a foundational law of the universe.
And the most ludicrous part is they are all completely contradicting each other.
One fitness creator swears that lifting heavy is the only way to save your joints; the next one insists that low-impact Pilates is the true holy grail. One plant influencer tells you to mist your soil daily; the next claims that if you don't bottom-water with filtered rain, you are committing botanical murder.
It’s a crisis of hyper-instruction. We are being pulled in a million different directions simultaneously. And, in the process, we have developed a severe case of Intuition Atrophy.
What happened to f*cking around and finding out?
Human beings used to learn things through a beautiful, chaotic, and necessary process called trial and error. You bought a plant. You watered it too much. The leaves turned yellow. You thought, “Ah, right, probably shouldn’t do that again,” and you adjusted. You engaged with reality directly and developed a localised, experiential wisdom called intuition.
But the interest-based algorithm has completely intercepted that loop.
Now, before we even attempt an action, we search the feed. We consume twenty different tutorials before we even pick up the spatula or the makeup brush. We have been conditioned to believe that there is a correct way to do literally everything, and that our raw, uneducated instincts are fundamentally broken.
The result isn’t that we become more skilled. The result is total cognitive paralysis.
When you spend four to six hours a day absorbing the aggressive, conflicting certainty of strangers, your brain becomes a noisy, crowded room. Your gut voice doesn’t get out-voted; it simply gets drowned out by the volume of the crowd.
We have outsourced our taste, our confidence, and our basic human agency to people whose only actual qualification is that they own a ring light.
If we want to stay sane in an era of infinite advice, we have to treat our intuition like a muscle that has gone completely limp from underuse. Reclaiming it requires a deliberate, aggressive act of digital defunding.
Here is how you start listening to yourself again:
1. Embrace the "bad" result
The fear of doing something "wrong" is the trap that keeps you tethered to the tutorials. Give yourself permission to make a terrible meal, wear a weird outfit, or mess up a project. Failure is the exact raw material that your intuition uses to build itself, not a waste of time, or resources.
2. Put your phone elsewhere while you create
The next time you sit down to do a hobby, get dressed, or cook dinner, banish the screen. Force yourself to look at the materials in front of you and ask a question that has become entirely foreign to the modern mind: “What do I feel like doing right now?” It will feel uncomfortable at first. Sit with the discomfort. That is your inner voice waking up.
3. De-amplify the so-called “experts”
Remind yourself that the creator yelling at you about the proper way to contour your nose doesn't actually care about your face. They care about their watch time. Their certainty is an algorithmic survival mechanism, not a reflection of objective truth. On social media, nuance is invisible and nuance gets scrolled past. Loud, unyielding dogma is the only thing that pays the bills.
So, how can brands win with all the advice fatigue?
For the marketers and founders reading this, the saturation point of the "Expert Economy" hath arrived. We’re all exhausted by being told we are doing everything wrong.
The next generation of industry-defining brands won't be the ones that provide more instructions. It will be the brands that celebrate the amateur:
- Sell the mess, not the masterclass: Change your creative direction. Stop using hyper-polished influencers who present your product with clinical perfection. Start building campaigns around the beautiful, real, un-choreographed mess of everyday consumers using your product in their own weird, un-optimised ways.
- Build open-ended products: Stop gatekeeping how your products should be consumed or styled. Create marketing copy that explicitly tells the consumer: “There are no rules here. Figure out what works for you.” Empowering the consumer’s autonomy is the ultimate form of brand trust.
- Champion intuitive design: Look at products that require zero manual, zero tutorials, and zero setup. The simpler, more intuitive, and more forgiving your product is to human error, the more it will feel like a breath of fresh air in a world that feels like an ongoing, high-stakes exam.
The internet promised to give us all the answers.
But in doing so, it made us forget that we already had the questions.
Whenever a 20-something-year-old creator on your feed tries to tell you that the way you're living your life is completely incorrect, I want you to swipe away.
Look down at your own hands, listen to the quiet, dusty corner of your own mind, and remember that nobody on earth knows how to be you better than you do.
Stay safe out there, soldiers x
-Sophie Randell, Writer
