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I think the idea that advice is useful is bad advice.
Life is incredibly complicated. It's often a fools errand to reduce something to a simplistic caricature and make a decision based on how some general advice you decide fits this oversimplification.
It's also often a fools errand to look back on life to find key moments where you made decisions like following advice or not. Sometimes it's easy and straightforward to do this. Like, "I shouldn't have killed that guy." But in my experience, life is far too complicated most of the time to make these kinds of cause and effect proclamations.
The difficulties we face make us better people and allow us to know our deep values and strengths. The things we want are often only fleetingly enjoyable but regrettable or stagnating in the long term. Even things that seem good or bad within a decade can totally flip to their opposite in later years. And, of course, we aren't guaranteed any time on this planet, nor are we given knowledge about how things will turn out.
The advice to save money and build a retirement fund from an early age could be the key to unlocking an extremely meaningful life. Or, you could die tomorrow.
I think a lot of advice is generalizable. Something like "take care of your health," I can't think of as ever being bad advice. Of course there are exceptions to every rule, but most of the famous proverbs and wise quotes have stood the test of time for a reason: They are true more often than not.
I remember Dan Blizerian saying this on the Joe Rogan show. 99% of the time you break your leg there's no good fortune that came out of it (unless you win some sort of settlement), it's usually just shitty luck.
The analogy you gave about saving, yeah you can save for retirement and then die early... happens a lot, but most people don't die before retirement age, so your best bet is to heed the advice. You don't want to go through life assuming you are the exception and not the rule. By definition, you're rarely the exception.