I love the genre of advice that frames everything as coming from parent to child, senior to junior. I love it because it assumes that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, knowledge that was hard-earned (if indeed you did earn it and aren’t just cadging it from a TED talk somewhere) can be passed down in a way that is actually beneficial to those that haven’t come close to the lesson yet. This lesson can be skipped, you say (implictly)! Explictly, I learned it the hard way (but there is an easy one). The framing of parental advice (and all other relationships that follow the model of ‘listen here, lad/lass’) assumes that the average parent, if not selfish and disingenuous, is aligned in interest with the child, sufficiently at least that the child should trust that the additional experience of the parent really does have bearing on the problem. ‘I want what’s best for you’ etc. At the same time, we learn very early on that our seniors may in fact be acting from ‘for my own ego, it’s important that you hear this’ or ‘what’s best for you must be aligned with what’s best for me’ or the more covert, ‘I want there to be an easy way’.

In practice, what you actually get out is, often at least: ‘it didn’t help, he also wasn’t wrong’. I think we’re very very bad at identifying the situations where such knowledge can actually be transferred.

One of the features of the sub-agent model is essentially the subagents giving advice, right? I mean, especially the ‘models of friends or family’ idea - you have all these incoherent parts of yourself, some of which are personified as actual people that exist outside of your mind as well. And they want you to do things, or have a view on what you should do. Either you listen or you do not. I can see that in retrospect, it’s sometimes helpful to consider actions or behaviours as a result of the desires or needs of those fragmented parts of yourself (‘I was stir-crazy that day because the kelpie tore up the place’) although this does slightly confusing things to the question of personal agency.

But ahead of action, especially when decisions rather than behaviours are being considered, does it make sense to consider these subagents as having needs which you would be helping to meet (which may colour their advice)? Do all of the ways advice can fail when you’re hearing it in the world still apply when you are considering it from parts of your own mind? Do our sub- agents have egos of their own? Perhaps sometimes their advice is motivated by your internalised understanding of the needs of that external friend, when the question relates to them (‘yes, you should move closer to where I’m living’). Is there always still a ‘you’ that is the decision maker?