Slightly off topic, I have a very dear friend who calls me up all the time to talk about his constant life drama. It seemed to me for a long time he was framing the conversation as looking for advice, since when advice was given the conversation seemed to move along rather well.<p>The thing about advice is it almost requires you to invest yourself a little in the other person's problem and advice starts turning into involvement, which can be frustrating when the other party doesn't follow the advice, as my friend almost never does. Over the years I found that he'd typically ignore good advice, get himself into trouble, come back for more advice/a way out of his disaster and then repeat until I was getting way too involved in his business. Which left me in a foul mood and our friendship on the rocks.<p>It's tempting for the receiver to take that advice/involvement as most people are looking for a little bit of help through problem areas.<p>But I've learned from him that it's often better to not get involved at all in other people's business, even if it's just advice,...no matter how tempting it is. They have to make the mistakes and learn from the experience themselves. And if they can't learn from that experience, maybe they shouldn't be involved in doing whatever it is they're doing.<p>This is really hard to do though, especially for engineer types who view the world as a sequence of problems. There's a lot of pop-sociology that men like to fix things and women like to talk about things, which is used to explain the constant need for guys to give advice, and often results in relationship counseling like "just listen to your girlfriend/wife, that's all she wants, she's <i>emotionally</i> processing".<p>I think it's a bit too gender biased so I've taken that idea and reworked it to "most people just want to vent or verbally process their issues". Just listen to them, nod a bit, if you have a similar situation try and and talk about it too, but don't focus on how you solved it, just dialog. For <i>many</i> people, it's about ordering their thoughts so the solution presents itself to them.<p>For my friend, he's started to realize where lots of his life faults are, and is <i>slowly</i> coming to the realization that they aren't good long-term things to carry around. He's looking at lots of digging to get himself out of some bad problems he's gotten into, so he keeps looking for an easier alternative/other way out. But letting him talk things out helps him see that he's really only got one choice, and it's going to take a long time to do it.