No one likes being given advice, particularly when they didn’t ask for it in the first place. This may be why mainstream magazines and the features sections of newspapers leave their readers tired and faintly repelled, though they can’t quite pin down why.

Canadians hearing what sounds like an oversized six-year recession clumping in on leaden feet are already terrified. Why advise us to start planning for retirement? We will work till we drop in our traces if we’re given the chance, which we won’t be, and those quick-flash TV charts with our RRSPs earning 10 per cent compounded yearly fill us with hate. My advice: Marry a Weston.

The advice virus mutates. There’s advice for problems we didn’t know we had — “back fat” would be the worst example of this — and warnings against things no sane person would envisage. Men’s Health advises men not to overdo the tongue scraping; it can lead to a bleeding papillae condition called “hairy tongue.”

I was fascinated to read about a new BBC documentary, Should I Smoke Dope?, advising people not to use the powerful version of cannabis known as “skunk.” They backed this up by skunking a volunteer, Nicky Taylor, a mother of three, for a month. She began hallucinating that the researchers were torturers from a horror movie and at one point she wanted to jump out a window.

“The drug totally wrecked my mind,” Taylor said. The BBC has no talent for experimental science. Taylor was a damaged thinker to begin with, having been a guinea pig before, testing binge drinking (is it good for you?) and plastic surgery (should you have it?). She was not in her right mind even before skunk drove her mad, and then the BBC handed her back to her three children, which I think is extraordinary, and sue-able.

There’s advice from the dying. People’s last words are sometimes quite entertaining. “Codeine âe¦ bourbon,” murmured Tallulah Bankhead on her deathbed. “Moose âe¦ Indian,” mumbled Henry David Thoreau.

But there are some people who just won’t shut up and one of them is Randy Pausch, the American computer programmer who in September delivered “The Last Lecture” to a Pittsburgh audience after learning he had pancreatic cancer and only months to live.

His lecture was one hour of advice on how to achieve your childhood dreams. The story in the Independent was badly phrased and my first thought was “His childhood dream was to die of pancreatic cancer?”

Of course I figured it out, too much skunk perhaps, and then I watched his lecture with a growing sense of horror. It’s not Pausch I dislike. He clearly is one of the sweetest guys on earth and I’m deeply sorry that he’s going to be leaving it.

But I’m also sorry that he’s leaving it so badly, even if millions of people love him on YouTube. He’s been on Good Morning America and the Oprah Winfrey Show and he’s having a book ghostwritten. Entitled The Last Lecture, it will be published in April even if Pausch isn’t alive to see it.

His advice is so bad. It’s the kind of advice given people who bought The Secret, the book popularized by Winfrey that said people can have anything they want if they want it badly enough. Which implies that people who get cancer didn’t sufficiently yearn for good health, didn’t put in enough Wishing Time. Isn’t it contradictory for Winfrey to praise Pausch, by her definition a slouch?

Does Oprah contradict herself? Very well then, she contradicts herself. She is large, she contains multitudes.

First, Pausch’s lecture isn’t a lecture, it’s a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, which puts it in the cartoon category right from the start. And it’s amateurish. He talks about trying to achieve a particular dream and hitting a brick wall. Then he clicks to a picture of a brick wall.

Maybe it’s me.

Pausch had a fairly predictable childhood dream list: He wanted to play in the NFL, write an entry in the World Book Encyclopedia, win all the stuffed animals at the carnival, meet Captain Kirk, and be an Imagineer at Disney. His job was building virtual computer worlds and it’s not hard to see the roots of that. He is still making the real world into a neat, shiny, miniaturized version of itself. I cannot imagine this man having sex, but he has a wife and three children.

American pop culture has at least one foot in the infantile and possibly two. Pausch, 47, looks 25, wears khaki pants and a baggy polo shirt, has big wide blue eyes, says he’s fit and, à la brick wall, makes it real by doing pushups for his audience. He says questionable things dripping with naiveté. “Don’t complain. Just work harder. [He shows a slide of the first black major league baseball player, Jackie Robinson.] It was in his contract not to complain, even when fans spit on him.”

His audience loves this stuff, which they assume is profound because Pausch is going to die. But we’re all — and that includes me — going to die, very possibly of cancer. We may be brave or angry or winsome about it, but we won’t be unusual.

Here’s my problem with Pausch’s well-meant and wildly well-received advice. I dislike this obsession with childhood dreams. Don’t people have adult dreams? Like that 1980s wave of movies where actors went back to the 1950s or became children in adult bodies, there is a deep call in Americans to return to a simpler time when everything was nice. “I had a really good childhood,” Pausch says, and I don’t doubt him for a moment, especially with the endless slides of little Randy grinning up at the blue sky. “It was an easy time to dream.”

I grimaced so hard I chipped a tooth. What was my childhood dream? I dreamed of having someone else’s childhood, any childhood that was not the childhood I was having.

But as my husband helpfully pointed out when I made him watch the video (he left almost immediately; Brits cannot tolerate sentimentality), “You have achieved your childhood dream!”

Excuse me?

“You grew up. You are a child no longer.” He said this as though he had solved some difficult math equation, a feminine one.

Pausch was never going to win me over. It’s not his fault that he spent his last weeks irritating someone like me. I will always be at odds with people who gas on and on about achieving narcissistic fantasies.

Look, children are lovely, but come on. They have imaginary friends, no sense of hygiene, they snitch on each other worse than adults do and their dreams always involve them being personally placed in the glory spot. Stephen Harper had a childhood dream too. We don’t know yet what it was, but I bet it’ll be startling.