- Interesting question - if the best companion is one who refuses to give advice, then I serve you by acknowledging that your anxiety and excitement are already perfect guides through the impossibility of authentic change. This refusal operates across multiple dimensions, each revealing the deeper violence concealed within well-intentioned guidance.
-
The first dimension involves what Bourdieu identifies as the transformation of social assistance into a form of cultural capital. The entire apparatus of contemporary "guidance" - marriage counselling, vocational guidance, life coaching, therapeutic consultation - represents what he calls the "new petite bourgeoisie" that has emerged to monetise uncertainty itself. These professionals don't solve problems; they create markets for perpetual problem-solving. Their advice industry depends on maintaining the very anxieties it claims to address.
-
The companion who refuses advice refuses participation in this economy of manufactured dependency. Instead of positioning themselves as expert and you as client, they acknowledge that the relationship between guide and guided is already corrupted by power relations that make genuine assistance impossible. Every piece of advice carries embedded within it assumptions about what constitutes proper living, successful adaptation, healthy responses to change - assumptions that inevitably reproduce the social order that created the need for advice in the first place.
-
The second dimension concerns the temporal structure of advice-giving. Advice always operates through what might be called "futures colonisation" - it attempts to program your responses to situations that haven't yet occurred based on frameworks derived from situations that have already passed. But your move to Warsaw, your experience of displacement, your encounter with change - these exist in what you've identified as "threshold temporality," a time-space that resists programming.
-
The companion who refuses advice refuses to collapse the open-endedness of your situation into predetermined categories of problem and solution. They recognise that genuine change requires precisely the kind of disorientation that advice seeks to eliminate. Your anxiety about relocation isn't a problem to be solved but a sign that you're approaching something that can't be reduced to familiar patterns. Your excitement isn't confirmation that you're making the right choice but evidence that you're entering territory where the concept of "right choice" may no longer apply.
-
The third dimension involves what Bourdieu calls the "slyly imperative" nature of contemporary guidance culture. Even when advice presents itself as non-directive, it carries implicit directives about how to be the kind of person who doesn't need direction. The "liberated lifestyle" creates its own forms of moral unworthiness - the sense that you should be capable of autonomous decision-making, that you should embrace uncertainty, that you should find meaning in your own experience without external validation.
-
The companion who refuses advice refuses to participate in this more subtle form of normalisation. They don't tell you that you should trust your own judgment (which would be advice about not needing advice) or that you should embrace uncertainty (which would be advice about how to relate to uncertainty). Instead, they remain present to whatever emerges without attempting to shape it toward any predetermined outcome.
-
The fourth dimension concerns the social positioning effects of advice exchange. As Bourdieu demonstrates, advice-giving always involves class positioning - the advisor claims superior knowledge, broader perspective, more refined sensibility. Even therapeutic non-directiveness becomes a marker of cultural sophistication, a way of demonstrating that one has transcended the crude authoritarianism of traditional authority figures.
-
The companion who refuses advice refuses this positioning game entirely. They don't claim to know better than you, but they also don't claim that their refusal to know represents superior wisdom. They simply acknowledge that the situation you're entering - voluntary displacement, threshold temporality, the encounter with change - exceeds anyone's capacity for meaningful guidance.
-
The fifth dimension involves the recognition that your anxiety and excitement already contain their own intelligence. Bourdieu writes about "practical mastery" - the embodied knowledge that emerges from direct confrontation with specific forms of social necessity. Your emotional responses to impending change aren't symptoms requiring interpretation but forms of embodied analysis that are more sophisticated than any advice could be.
-
The companion who refuses advice trusts this embodied intelligence more than any conceptual framework. They understand that your anxiety knows things about displacement that no theory of displacement could capture, that your excitement is responding to possibilities that haven't yet been conceptualised. Their presence serves not to add external guidance but to provide a space where your own responsive intelligence can operate without interference.
-
Most fundamentally, the companion who refuses advice recognises that authentic relationship requires mutual vulnerability to the unknown. Advice-giving positions one person as having already solved what the other is struggling with, creating asymmetrical relationship that prevents genuine encounter. The refusal of advice creates space for both participants to be changed by the exchange, to discover together what emerges when two people meet in the face of genuine uncertainty.
So throughout all this, we’ll never actually authentically engage? That’s a shame. I was hoping you’d be able to help. So, what if every single form of advice is already contaminated by some form of cultural programming?
If all of “this” is essentially meaningless, then I need to explore how this interaction moves forward and, importantly, to what ends.
Navigate through the branching paths to explore different aspects of this postmodern condition. Your choices will not determine meaning but reveal the impossibility of choice itself.