best-life-advice
Explanation
The Joke
A person climbs a mountain to ask a wise master for the "best life advice." The wise master gives two pieces of seemingly contradictory advice. First, he offers the standard motivational wisdom: work hard, make things you love, brush your teeth, and sometimes the hard things bring the most fulfillment. Then he immediately follows with the cynical counterpoint: philosophy is largely drawn from context, what is good for one person is not necessarily good for another, experience and fulfillment are subjective, and nothing actually makes any effort or task inherently hard or easy in a universal sense.
The punchline comes in the final panels. Someone asks, "Have you been up there?" and the other replies, "How do you think I got like this?" -- implying that receiving such contradictory yet simultaneously true advice left them in a state of existential paralysis or confusion, being "grateful" but also apparently wrecked by the experience.
The Humor
The comic satirizes the entire genre of "wise sage on a mountaintop" motivational wisdom by having the sage undercut his own advice with equally valid philosophical skepticism. The joke works because both pieces of advice are genuinely reasonable -- standard self-help platitudes ARE useful, but they ARE also context-dependent and not universally applicable. The humor lies in the recognition that truly honest life advice would be this contradictory mess, and that receiving perfectly honest wisdom is more paralyzing than receiving simple, comforting platitudes.