What's the Best Advice You've Gotten?

( Philip Galanes )
Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC Studios in SoHo. Happy New Year. Thanks for spending part of your day with us. I'm grateful that you are here. On today's show, Gretchen Rubin joins us to talk about how to pick up a new hobby. We'll also learn what works are entering the public domain this year. Hey, maybe one of your new hobbies could be adapting one of them to music. We'll hear about a very special concert that's happening next Wednesday at Joe's Pub. That is the plan. Let's get this first live show started of 2025. Let's go.
[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: You and Me]
Alison Stewart: A new year is a time when many of us take stock and ponder how we want to be living. Sometimes we do this by sifting through collective wisdom and trying to find out what resonates with us. We want to know, what is the best advice you've ever received? Have you ever had someone say something that really helped you or changed how you look at something or how you're going to use it in the new year? Please share it with us. Call or text us at 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Tell us the best advice you have ever been given. How would you put it into practice? 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can also reach out to us on social media @allofitwnyc.
We have with us a wonderful guest for this conversation. Philip Galanes is the Social Q's columnist for The New York Times, where he approaches each question with warmth and wise advice. Philip, welcome back to All Of It.
Philip Galanes: Thank you, Alison. Thank you for having me on January 2, 2025.
Alison Stewart: [laughs] I like the way you say that.
Philip Galanes: I know. It's a moment.
Alison Stewart: It truly is. I'm thinking to myself, "You know what? This is the first 25 years that I can really remember."
Philip Galanes: Really?
Alison Stewart: You think about that, you know?
Philip Galanes: It's true. I don't remember 19-- You mean like 1950, 1975? You don't remember the year 2000? How old are you, darling?
Alison Stewart: We'll leave that alone. We'll talk about the Social Q's column. We'll talk about your job. You've had it for 16 years.
Philip Galanes: Forever.
Alison Stewart: You are also an attorney.
Philip Galanes: I am.
Alison Stewart: You are also a novelist. How did those two jobs prepare you for what you do now?
Philip Galanes: It's really interesting to me because I didn't go to Dear Abby University, so I didn't expect that anyone would ever call me up to write an advice column. I think the thing that I learned, the best thing that I learned about being a lawyer, is that people really want to talk. They want to tell you their story. Even though they are coming to an alleged expert for some kind of advice, what they really want to do is get something off their chests. I discovered pretty quickly that the better I could listen to them and convince them that I'd really heard them, the better we could focus on whatever problem had brought them into the office.
I will also say that being a lawyer is a slightly soul-deadening job. I woke up very early in the mornings and was working on a novel for many years. It was a novel about a young man whose emotional and physical distance from me is less than a centimeter long, whose father killed himself just when the young guy-- Just when I was getting to be an adult, just as I'm an adult, my dad kills himself, and I'm trying to figure out what that means. How am I implicated? What does any of this mean? I started writing a novel about that and turned out the best way I could do that was with a little bit of snark. The novel has definitely as hard, but it has a lot of snark.
A woman, a great editor at the Style section of The Times read the book and said, "This really could be a fresh take on an advice column, a snarky advice columnist." That's how we started 15 years ago. We started mean. I would say some time in the middle slash end of the Obama administration, I thought, "Wow, things are pretty damn mean without me piling meanness on, too." I pivoted a little bit toward the thing that I'd learned as a lawyer, being more of a listener and trying to say, "This question might strike 97 readers out of 100 as utterly absurd and selfish, but to this one man or woman who's writing in, it's really important. I'm going to take it as importantly as she does." That's how. That's a long-winded answer to your question, but I think it answers it.
Alison Stewart: How have you seen the letters change over the 15 years?
Philip Galanes: The letters are filled with grievance more. It used to be that people had a complaint, and they spent the first paragraph saying how much they loved their daughter-in-law. Then somewhere around the second or third paragraph, they'd get to what a monster she is, but they started with how lovely she was. Now people get right into telling you how awful things are and how awful the world is and how awfully unfairly they've been treated or someone they care about has been treated so unfairly. I don't know if we put this down to social media and the fact that everybody is now an authority on telling everybody else what the world is like from their perspective. The letters have changed in a way that-- It surprises me how upset people are.
Alison Stewart: Do you find yourself wanting to help them not be upset and get to the problem?
Philip Galanes: What I do, I think I'm doing that. If you read the letters that come into me commenting on what I do, half of the people are like, "You are the most wonderful human being. We hope you live forever so you can have this job." The other half are saying, "We hope you contract stomach cancer next week and you're dead so we never have to listen to your insipid kindness again. We hate you." I'd say it's a mixed bag whether people like this approach to saying, "Yes, I hear how you feel. We all have felt this way. We all feel bad about stuff even when it's selfish to feel bad about it or even when it's not quite reasonable. Let's think of some strategies to make you feel less bad."
I think that's probably the best thing I can do. It's not universally acclaimed, I shall tell you that with my hand on the Bible.
Alison Stewart: Let's roll some calls. Emily in Nyack. Hi, Emily, thanks for calling All Of It.
Emily: Hi, how are you doing?
Alison Stewart: Doing great.
Emily: I just was going to call because several years ago I was going through a moment as a parent with a child that was having a really hard time. I truly was frightened for my son. A good friend told me that I needed to stop because I was reacting from a place of fear and that when we are fearful, we don't make good choices. He was absolutely right. I was making the situation worse because I was so fearful of what could happen to my child. I've always appreciated that and used it as a way to monitor my reactions, whether they're coming from a place of fear.
Alison Stewart: Emily, thank you for calling. Let's also talk to Dom in Manhattan. Hi, Dom.
Dom: Hi, how are you?
Alison Stewart: Doing great.
Dom: Oh, great. Probably the best piece of advice I ever saw was that every problem you ever have is like a cow stuck in a ditch on a ranch. When you have that problem, you do three things. Three things only, and in this order. First, you get the cow out of the ditch.
Philip Galanes: Oh, wait. I'm getting a pad.
Alison Stewart: What's the first thing? Getting a pad.
Dom: First, you get the cow out of the ditch. Then second, you figure out how the cow got in the ditch. Then third, you make sure that darn cow can never get in that darn ditch ever again.
Alison Stewart: Good advice, Dom. Thanks for calling. Laura calling in from Glen Cove. Hi, Laura. Thanks for calling All Of It.
Laura: Hi there. Happy New Year. The best advice I ever got was I was a young woman in a company and one of the board of directors, a female, said to me, "Nothing is ever going to happen unless you're there." I took that and wrote it on a Post-it note, stuck it on my computer and every time I was too tired to go to a networking event or just felt like I couldn't go to another meeting, I read that and it helped me so much to meet the people that made a difference in my career.
Alison Stewart: Thank you for that advice, Emily. Philip, anything you wanted to respond to from our listeners?
Philip Galanes: I think that your listeners, all of them had great advice to share with us. Also, we're doing something that I think people want an advice columnist to do, but they really don't. They might say, "How should I deal with my son? I'm so nervous about him." Or, "How do I get this cow out of the ditch? I'm so nervous about my cow. I'm frightened for my cow." They don't really want you to tell them that. In my experience, we have to give people a chance to talk about what they're afraid of and what their challenge is. How the hell do you get a 1,000-pound cow out of the ditch to start with?
A lot of things, a lot of times when we think we're going to somebody to say, "Tell me what to do," they really don't want to be told what to do. They want to have someone say to them, "Why don't you tell me a little bit more about what's bothering you?" That's how I'd respond. That's how I'd respond to them, which doesn't take anything away from the excellent callers because I thought they all made great points.
Alison Stewart: Got this text, "Radical acceptance. When I was at a very low point in my life, I had to resign myself to the fact that I did not have control over the situation and had to radically accept that there was nothing I could do about it." "Best advice I got from my dad right after I graduated from college, 'The only things worth going into debt for are your education and your home.'" That's Anna from Brooklyn. This one is interesting, "Through studying Buddhism. Absolutely best advice, impermanence. Everything is temporary. Just breathe. It will change."
Philip Galanes: That's great.
Alison Stewart: When you're looking through by my way, my guest is Philip Galanes. We're talking about the best advice you've ever received. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Your range of things that you address go from really low stakes, like banning kids from adult functions to really high stakes. There was a column about contacting a gay niece who was thrown out of the house. Sometimes they're outright bizarre, like the uber-rich, the family that wanted to get the dog cloned. I don't know. They were arguing about the dog. When subjects come across your desk, do you put them in piles in silos of lighter, medium, heavy, or do you just take everything at face value?
Philip Galanes: That's a great question. I take them all at face value. I take them all at, "How interested am I in this question? How interested?" Then later, it's sort of like seating at a dinner party. It's like, "That poor gay teenager who's been chucked out of her home-- it can't exist in the same column as the man who's grieving the loss of his wife of 60 years." There has to be a balance. I'm able to go through them very quickly and probably too quickly because the one factor for me is when I read it, do I go, "Huh, that's interesting? I don't know. What do you think? How do you think we should deal with banning children from a party or contacting the gay teenager who's been chucked out of her house?" Making the first cut-- it's the cut that's just the most arbitrary. Then after that, it becomes like shuffling them. There's a tonal variety to things.
Alison Stewart: Because you have an editorial sense you have to match.
Philip Galanes: Yes, I have an editorial sense that people don't want to feel like they want to jump out of a window after they read an advice column. They also don't want to go, "Oh, these people are all pains in the neck. I don't like any of them." I try to find somewhere the people are very-- where their problem is very relatable and appealing and somewhere the problem is a bit silly and somewhere the problem really strikes right at your heart.
Alison Stewart: We are having a conversation with our guest, Philip Galanes. He's the Social Q's columnist for The New York Times. You are our guest as well. We're talking about the best advice that you have ever received. Our number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can call in and join us on air or send us a text. We'll get more of your messages, your advice after a quick break. This is All Of It.
[music]
Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Philip Galanes. He's the Social Q's columnist for The New York Times. We are talking about the best advice you've ever received. We'll get to more calls in just a moment, but I do want to ask you, do you ever follow up with people who've written letters to you?
Philip Galanes: I do. I especially do it-- and I don't know if this would be what most people would do. When young people write to me and I get a lot of questions from very young people on a surprising range of issues, I worry about them.
Alison Stewart: That's so sweet.
Philip Galanes: Some of them I don't publish even, I just respond to them. Those are the only letters that I will respond to that are not for publication. When a kid writes in and has a fundamental misunderstanding about pregnancy or something serious. I like to follow up. Sometimes when letters just generate a ton of controversy, I follow up too. It used to be before the social mediafication of all media that people would write into my column, I would answer the column, it would exist in the paper or on the website, and that would be the end of it.
Then someone in a special engagement team figured out we will really get our readers more engaged if we give them a chance to comment on the question and the advice and all that. It often turns people who've maybe been a little ham-handed in the way they describe their problem-- it turns them into real whipping boys and whipping girls. It makes me feel so terrible for them that I like to follow up and tell them, "This happens a lot. It is not a reflection on you at all. You're terrific. Let me know if you got your problem solved."
I can remember that happened once with a woman who was a mother of a teenage girl, and the teenage girl wanted privacy like any teenager. Any teenager starts to want privacy. That's the beginning of being a teenager. The girl unknowingly, apparently, went to a thrift shop and bought a gun safe. The mother, because of some gun violence issues in her life, just didn't want anything related to guns in her life, in her house, and people tore her to shreds. It was so unnecessary.
Yes, I understand. Respecting the daughter's autonomy and her privacy. That's a really important thing. So many of us are affected by gun violence in this world that also not wanting to have something that's got a foamy cutout in the shape of a revolver in your daughter's room. I can understand why a mom or a dad might not want that, too. I could understand it. Those are the people that I go back to, kids, on the one hand, and then people who have been really decimated.
Alison Stewart: We got a text here that says, "My mom always says, 'Drink your best wine first, literally. That way you're always drinking your best wine.'" More broadly, it means that you should enjoy the things you have now rather than save them for later. She uses her grandmother's china for casual weeknight dinners. "The best advice I ever got was to ask forgiveness, not permission. It was life-changing and making me more confident in my job." Let's take some more calls. Vivian calling from New Milford. Hi, Vivian.
Vivian: Hi, and Happy New Year. I'm calling because when I was a new parent, a dear friend visited us and he used a phrase that has always stuck with me, which was, "Instead of I have to, like, I have to get up in the middle of night to feed my baby, I get to get up in the middle of night and feed my baby." That small turn of phrase I use for so many things in my life, and it's a wonderful mindset.
Alison Stewart: Thank you for calling in. Let's talk to Yvonne from Westchester. Hi, Yvonne.
Yvonne: Hi there. Happy New Year.
Alison Stewart: Same to you.
Yvonne: One of the things I learned from a mentor, Daisaku Ikeda, who is a Buddhist teacher, he said, "Life is a visual manifestation of the invisible workings of the mind." Whatever you think, you can create. With your thoughts, you create your world. With that is our thoughts of, do what you love, work doing what you love. When you do that, you create an energy. The energy that you're creating, which is coming from a place of love and happiness that's within you, there's this invisible frequency. In that invisible frequency, it transmits just like the Internet, just like the radio. It transmits. When you transmit that energy, which is coming from that place of love and happiness and enjoying the things you do, you invite incredible things into your life, into your world.
Alison Stewart: We're going to stop there. Thank you so much, Yvonne. We really appreciate what you're saying. Let's also talk to Ed. Hi, Ed.
Ed: Hi. How are you?
Alison Stewart: Doing great.
Ed: My advice was a friend at work told me, he goes, "Never refuse to have a catch with your son." It was such wonderful advice because, number one, having a catch with your son is great one-on-one time. The second thing is my son knew he was important enough that he could interrupt me with anything that I was doing to have that one-on-one time with him.
Alison Stewart: Thanks for calling. Toby from Manhattan. Hi, Toby.
Toby: Hi. Happy New Year. The advice I can say confused me came from my grandmother, who I respected a lot. I had a wonderful relationship with her. She would tell me, "Life, your life, it's not practice." Why it confused me was because I thought, well, maybe on the one hand that means I should lead a more conservative life. Or maybe what she means is I should take more gambles and throw more caution to the wind. I thought a lot about it ever since, and it's not been clear to me, but it's definitely made me think.
Alison Stewart: Toby, thanks for calling in. Philip, when you hear people tell stories about this, "My grandmother said--", "Someone said to me--" they tell you about one very specific thing, but then it reaches out to encapsulate so much else.
Philip Galanes: I think that's a wonderful thing. I also think it's based in the fact that Toby's grandmother spent probably-- she knew him for 15 or 20 years before she told him that story. She might have told his older brother, who was a different kind of person, she might have given him different advice. Advice is so specific. It's so much about what a person might need to hear or want to hear or be able to hear. The best situations are when you're really intimate with a person and they can suggest ways that you can think about your life based on what they've observed.
I can't tell people life's not practice because I don't know how they take that advice. I don't know them well enough. They're strangers to me. I have to be more cautious than these-- the wonderful advice that I'm hearing from people's family and friends. If my father, when I was a kid, had taken every call of mine at his office, the poor man would never have been able to come home. I called him every second that I wanted or needed some child thing. It would have been insane. It really worked for the guy who was told that by a coworker, and it's fantastic.
Alison Stewart: This is a texter that says, "It's okay to cry. Crying is like taking the garbage out. Even for men. There are three things to remember. Be kind. Be kind. Be kind." Where do you go for good advice when you need advice, Philip?
Philip Galanes: I've got to say that I was a real mom person. My mom was wonderful and a monster in that she could turn almost anything-- You could be lying bloody in the middle of the road, and she could turn it into something about her really, really quickly. She was fantastic at giving you something very pithy to answer your specific need, but then we could turn back to the real subject of the relationship, which was what she might want or need or something. That might sound bitchy, and I don't mean it that way because I really, really loved her, but that's who I used to go to. Now I would say I get a lot of my best advice by going on very long walks by myself.
Alison Stewart: What do you think is the best advice that you've ever given?
Philip Galanes: The best advice I've ever given, I think, was to a parent who had very good reason not to forgive her child for something that he had done and to forgive him anyway. Just to forgive. Just to keep forgiving as long as it took for him to understand that he didn't have to act like a monster in order for her to love him or that she wasn't going to turn away from him. She was a person that I followed up with. She was from very early in my tenure. I still get letters from her every once in a while. Being kind, like your earlier caller said, being loving, forgiving. You're never going to regret any of that. You're just not. I think it's probably the best way for all of us to go whenever it's humanly possible.
Alison Stewart: Philip Galanes is the Social Q's columnist for The New York Times. Thank you for your time.
Philip Galanes: My pleasure. Thank you.
Alison Stewart: Thanks to everyone who called in.