If you really can distinguish a BS advice from a brilliant one, you're almost there. I consider what you do very important. There's no way one can do anything of substantial value in life, whether performed on oneself or others, without understanding oneself first (what is reality and what's it mean to be human, and what are logical extensions of these answers? -- are the oldest questions in philosophy; they're also considered the obvious common ground in terms of what people consider interesting among intelligent individuals). Making notes, creating written feedback loops with yourself, is probably the best way to get to bottom of what's really going on with almost everything. I know it changed my life. Decades passed by and I only do more of that. I knew you get it :-) I'm so happy. The world is going to have one more reasonable individual. So keep going!

Beware of HN and similar communities, though. Although often one can meet exceptional people here, the HN also suffers from usual: social-media-ish mobs, cargo cults, herd thinking. I wouldn't be for instance particularly eager to take life advises from techies. A lot of them are let's say not very much grounded in reality ;) But every person who can reasonably answer the previously mentioned "what is reality and what's it mean to be human, and what are logical extensions of these answers?" is truly a good candidate for asking. One must have a framework in which one interprets reality. Gödel's incompleteness theorems are all about that (that might be the most important conclusion in the philosophy of science ever made). Our problems, even if just trivial ones, are definitely a part of reality, therefore one must know reality top to bottom in order to efficiently maneuver in it. The only other wisdom one can stumble upon is how to efficiently deal with this or that (I mean technical, not necessarily technological, problems). I must say that HN is great for that.

Also, consider learning about biases typical for human beings. Among them the most crucial one might be the survivorship bias. Knowing what kind of cognitive errors people make tremendously helps in our own reasoning, especially in keeping oneself vigilant in regard to that kind of stuff. It might save you life one day.

PS: Regarding "sorry for the trouble" - to me our discussion is far from that. It's a pleasure to help others, especially if that person is going to really apply the advice. It's like having 1000 children all over the world. Good ones. Also, thanks for pointing that email visibility issue. Now I get it. I was pretty sure the email address is available for registered user, which isn't the case. Howk!

PS2: Surely, we can only validate ourselves using logic. Then we can take other people's words and put them thru the filter of logic. If something is going to remain intact during that process, it's worth to think about it. Usually it isn't going to be the case. There's a well known phenomena in psychology called "crabs in the barrel" problem. Take a look on that. Let's not be like that kind of individuals, also let's not listen to what they say. Otherwise we'd be left with no time at our hands to do the real work, only confusion which crabs are eager to share with others to make themselves feel better.

PS3: From my experience and to the best of my knowledge, there's only one kind of successful individual this planet can deliver. A self-directed, self-managing, hungry for truth one. Again, you seem to be on a good way toward that.