Why do I give advice I don’t follow?
A friend asks what to do about a job, a partner, a habit. Your answer comes fast, and it’s good. Then you go home and do exactly what you told her not to. It’s easy to call that hypocrisy. It may be something else.
Shakespeare gives this gap to Portia early in The Merchant of Venice. Talking with her maid Nerissa in act I, scene II, she says:
"I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done than to be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching"
— William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, act I, scene II
Two different skills
Portia doesn’t blame weak will. A line earlier she says that if doing were as easy as knowing, chapels would be churches. Knowing is one skill, doing is another. Being good at the first says little about the second.
Then she adds an image: the brain may devise laws for the blood. Advice for someone else comes from the head. Your own life runs on the blood. The law gets written, and no one is there to carry it out.
Your own plans, other people’s lives
There’s a separate page on talking about plans and never acting. That one is about your own plans. This one is about advice for other people’s lives, which often sounds like a law you wrote for yourself.
What the play leaves
Shakespeare doesn’t tell Portia how to close the gap. He lets her name it. That leaves a question: what advice do I give most often, and why not to myself?
Epimelea is an app built around the existential school. The conversation carries over from one meeting to the next. The archive is encrypted on the device and belongs to the person who wrote it.
About the app: an AI therapist for long-term therapy
This page is about a school of psychotherapy. It is not medical advice and not emergency help. If you are in danger right now, contact your local emergency number, or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.