what is the day to day experience for an advive columnist?

There unfortunately aren't many people who actually write personal advice columns. It's an incredibly rare field, and one which is not growing much at all. The entire journalism field is a very challenging environment right now because the print business is shrinking like mad because most Americans get their news online. They have also stopped paying for newspapers, and the reduction in readership means that advertisers are pulling back their marketing dollars. As a result, the newspaper and magazine industries are struggling to find ways to remain relevant. Now to get to advice columns specifically, the first thing to consider is how broad that job market is. Try to estimate how many advice columns there are in your city, based on the number of local newspapers and local magazines which publish them. Then multiply that by the number of major cities in America and add an estimate for the national columns and you'll get a total job market for the entire country. My back-of-the-envelope calculation gets me somewhere into the low hundreds. That's a pretty small job market. There are almost as many astronauts as there are advice columnists. As for the day-to-day experience, only a small portion of it is giving advice. As a columnist, you're often either freelancing for multiple publishers at once, or you're a staff writer working on multiple columns. You will be getting submissions from readers to respond to, but you might only have a couple of hours to write up your whole advice column for the week. That will then go to your editor for review, and you had better hope that they don't have to fix anything or you might not be writing the column for long. You'll be spending the rest of your time trying to drum up new stories, sitting in editorial meetings, or researching and writing new stories. Depending on the type of publication, you might end up being asked to submit about one completed article or column per day, sometimes more and sometimes less.

Here's one way to tell if this is the right thing for you: if you love writing, and love telling stories through writing, and you want to write all day long every day, and you're really really good at writing excellent content quickly, then journalism might be the career for you.