What’s up with guilt?
I didn’t wake up today thinking, you know what? I’m going to write about guilt today. No. It actually didn’t even cross my mind. And, in fact, most of the time when the feeling pops up, I simply nudge it off instead of facing its full force.
Until (that is) the little peels of sadness begin to cluster in a mound that is too large to ignore. A bit like not hoovering for a few days, then a few weeks, until the dust and whatever dirt is on the floor piles up and stare you in the face, mean-looking and unforgiving.
Some of us walk around carrying heavy heaps of guilt in silence
Strictly speaking, I haven’t done anything wrong to feel guilty about, I tell myself.
But when that extra piece of cake is eaten in one gulp, or when I spend too many days to reply to a simple work email or ignore that long voice message from a friend on WhatsApp for far too long, I can’t help but feel one thing: guilt. And the list goes on:
- When I skip a workout day
- When I take the shorter path walking my dog
- When my family says, I wish you were here, but I can’t be
- When I know I will miss someone’s wedding
- When I probably should cook the beans from scratch instead of using the canned ones
- When I stay on working long past business hours and can’t have quality time with my partner
- When I speak when I know it’s better to stay silent
- When I feel unhappy and even more so for feeling unhappy when there are others facing worse hardships in their lives
- When there are days that I can’t give 110%
- When creativity won’t reach out to me and let me write
- When I think about the climate crisis and wish I could have been a biologist
- When I feel like my life’s purpose is not being followed
This isn’t a list to bring you down. Hold on with me here. The reason why I decided to write about this is that I’m fairly confident most of us go around carrying on our shoulders similar occurrences of guilt.
Guilt and the weight of responsibility
Take my mother, for instance. She held onto her the guilt of having let me go, at the age of 15 to live in another country, far away from her. Until recently, I had no idea that she felt like she had done something wrong. She asked me, “did I do it right by you?”
I told her, “you did the hardest thing a mother could do. And you did right. If I had stayed in Brazil, things would be very difficult for me.”
For 10 years she has lived with this fabricated guilt, that she, as a mother, could not be there with me, day in and day out, to stand by as I grew older into adulthood.
And especially with my parents, I am conscious that I sit on a throne they’ve built for me through all their sacrifices. Much like Rupi Kaur has written,
“my mother sacrificed her dreams | so I could dream” — (the sun and her flowers, p.148)
“i stand | on the sacrifices | of a million women before me” — (the sun and her flowers, p.213)
The weight of responsibility is immense. The expectation to accomplish something great is equally immense. Tied to all this is the need to honour and to continue to give this ancestral sacrifice worth and meaning so that what they have done was not in vain. To lose sight of this for even a second is to bring guilt upon myself.
What is the self-help aisle of the internet saying about guilt?
Searching online about guilt brought me to an article that said that; sometimes, guilt can be productive. And that, though negative, the feeling of guilt can help us repair relationships and even propel us to go forward in the direction we, and our inner moral compass, is telling us to go.
This idea goes against the junk-food-social-media-cards we see on Instagram with the hashtags #self-help, #selflove, #selfworth;
Don’t feel guilty, you’re doing your best
Don’t feel guilty, you’re amazing
Don’t feel guilty, remember you’re a hero!
Easier said than done. Especially on social media, where, though it’s seemingly an infinite space for sharing experiences, it hardly gives us enough room to really explore and dig deep on issues such as this.
Guilt and moral systems
A friend of mine the other day told me, “I think I do all this stuff that I do because I want to go against everything I was told was right when I was a child. I want to do all of it and prove they were wrong, and not feel guilty about my actions.”
My friend was of course referring to the patriarchal fabrication of false moral values to imbue in women the feeling that we are sinners, that we are always the wrong-doers. If we’re cat-called, it’s our fault. If we’re harassed, it’s our fault. If we can’t have a long-term relationship, it’s our fault. If people don’t take us seriously, it’s our fault.
When we talk about female guilt, oh boy, I could stay here for a very long time. But leaving the patriarchy aside for a minute, the matriarchy isn’t bereft of responsibility either. And the line between ancestral sacrifices and stifled, antiquated moral systems becomes very blurred.
To top it all off, we are constantly bombarded with information on how we should lead a life in order to be healthy and happy. I myself will cling to the words of Oprah, or Jay Shetty, Deepak Chopra, Dalai Lama, the list goes on. Then, there are also all the discourses around going vegan or exercising more, or all the actions we should take that could make this world a better place, all the petitions we ought to sign because it is the right thing to do. If I don’t live by these high standards — BOOM, guilt!
Guilt and the paradoxes of morality
Then, we are all hit by a global pandemic and we start seeing social responsibility, but also guilt, popping up more and more. If I’d accidentally forget to put my mask on, I’d feel guilty.
And now we have a society split between vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, another instance where morality is showcased as not being downright universal.
It’s easy to then begin to think that for every person alive, and who has ever lived, there is and there was a distinct universe reigned by this individual’s own representation of self, and self-derived set of moral rules. Whether these are false perceptions or true ones, will — I guess — depend on this individual’s level of awareness of the distinction between self and ego.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, because I’m someone that believes in universality, but when events such as a pandemic or even now with Afghanistan being taken over by the Taliban, I watch in horror — how could there be such a system with so many adepts?
This brings me to Hannah Arendt, who, trying to make sense of what fuelled the Holocaust, brought two ideas forward:
- That mass passivity leads out to inertia, and this reclusion from action does not mean that one is free from blame. Watching someone get hit by a car, when you could have stepped out and interfered could be taken as immoral. According to Arendt, the passivity in this situation is fuelled by selfishness. And now we’re in the philosophical territory of moral dilemmas.
- That the banality of evil, or the “the way in which the crime had become for the criminals accepted, routinised and implemented without moral revulsion and political indignation and resistance,” is the underlying currency that leads to mass crimes against humanity.
Would, then, the systemic desensitization or repetitive nature of certain actions, customs, and vocalization of ideas be able to change someone’s moral values? Or in other words, brainwash us all and abstain us of guilt?
I think not. If it could, the very word “subversion” would not exist in our vocabulary. However, nothing is either or in life.
Our individualized selves will resist adhering to systems we firmly and fundamentally believe to be wrong. And precisely because of this reason, externally-imposed blame is different from internally-acquired guilt.
Bottom line is, our moral beliefs and moral attachments, conjoined with our hyper association with the notion of “ego” and where this “ego” exists in relation to its environment are the key combined wallpapers where guilt can really shine through.
This essay is not really to address the argument that morality is subjective — that would be like digging a grave for myself and descend into a rabbit hole of loops that I don’t want to go into right now. Although I will leave this one premise, or question as food for thought: are one’s moral values directly associated with one’s conception of one’s life mission and/or purpose?
But there is something about morality and the notions of right vs wrong, and ultimately of judgement, that directly gives rise to guilt.
Is guilt a good thing?
So, to return to the article that said that guilt is actually a good thing…
Guilt, physically, doesn’t feel good. But does it work much in the same way suffering does? Is it like that pain in our knee that we need to go check with our doctor, who will bring the enlightenment that the shoes I’m wearing aren’t proper for my running?
Without suffering we wouldn’t avidly search for happiness. Without darkness, we wouldn’t avidly look for the light.
My focus here is not living mindlessly with the feeling of guilt, or continue to live mindlessly with suffering. But rather I’m focusing on the reacting aspect. The actual interrogation, the questioning;
What is this that I am feeling?
Why am I feeling this way?
How can I cure, heal this feeling?
What can I do to forgive myself?
Why are we not talking about guilt?
That’s why I’ve decided to talk and reflect on guilt. Yes, probably for myself, to try to make sense of this discomfort, but too to raise awareness that guilt is something hardly discussed. At least not with the same widespread as “mental health” and “depression,” even when guilt is embedded in both.
Below you can see a comparison in results on keywords searched on Google. The numbers refer to the average monthly searches, made in English, across the world in the past 12 months. The results were sampled on 19/08/2021.
The term “depression” has almost 2 million searches a month, while “guilt” has 300 thousand searches a month.
Now, it’s acceptable to speak openly about mental health and depression, but bring the word “guilt,” and things get shelved again.
In an article by Vox, the Buddhist concept of suffering is explained in a simplistic form as
Suffering = Pain x Resistance.
If we transfer that to guilt, assuming guilt to be a form of suffering, the discomfort lies in the resistance to be touched by the pain brought from guilt. Acknowledging its existence seems to be argued as the first step towards healing.
I can attest that even writing this personal essay/philosophical questioning has already relieved me of the initial burden I was carrying without even knowing.
Although the self-help posts on social media mean well (hopefully they’re not there to just spruce up social media vanity metrics), they are muting our cognition and even handicapping our willpower to actually question and go deep to the root cause of guilt-embedded emotions.
It’s easier to like and share a post that says “don’t feel guilty” rather than ask yourself, “why am I feeling this way?”
This exercise of awareness extends beyond guilt-originated feelings, but also to anger, anxiety, and so on.
The value of meditation and philosophical pondering
With our rushed everyday life, we hardly have time anymore to delve into philosophical questionings, or even meditate on certain concepts, the likes of morality, etc. Unless you are studying it at university.
If Socrates, or Seneca, or Descartes have thought us anything, is that philosophy isn’t limited to a single essay or academic life. Philosophy is a practice of life, of continuous revision, of living as an aware individual, aware of one’s actions and feelings.
Philosophy is about asking questions until the day you ask the right one and the truth is finally revealed.
As such, I will end with a question:
What should my next questioning be?
