Guilt that doesn't track performance

There's a kind of guilt that arrives before thought. You stop working and it's there. Then the mind explains it: You should have done more. You could be doing something now. You're resting when you could be helping.

It arrives before thought, which means thinking won't solve it.

So you do more, but it doesn't shrink. It moves to something else. The explanations change, but the feeling stays. The feeling is the constant, but the explanations are improvised.

That's a clue. Guilt that tracks performance responds to effort. This kind doesn't respond to effort. You address what it points to, and it points somewhere else. The target moves because the feeling isn't about the target. It's pointing at a gap between what you can do and what needs doing. That gap is real, and working harder won't close it.

Here is a check: when you do more, does it shrink? If you work a full day on something important and the guilt is unchanged, it's injury, not feedback.

There's always a gap between what you can do and what needs doing. That's just true.

For most of history, there was a point where you could be done. This work doesn't have that.

Global health, factory farming, existential risk: they're urgent and solvable in principle, but they're not completable by any individual. The solvable part is what makes it hard. Impossible problems release you. Solvable ones don't. So you stay engaged, but you can never finish. You can't dismiss it (it matters), you can't finish it (it's too big), you can't look away (you know too much).

A gap you can't close is moral injury. The term comes from soldiers, naming the wound left not by fear but by participation in something that violated their moral understanding. It shows up anywhere the work has this structure: climate activists, public defenders, healthcare workers in under-resourced systems. It's not the wound of doing wrong. It's the wound of not being able to do enough.

Underneath, if you stay with it long enough, there is sadness about not having an unlimited altruism budget.^[1]

There are three places to intervene: when the guilt arrives, what's built up in the body, and what keeps generating it. The first two manage symptoms. The third is slower, but it's about what feeds the pattern.

When it arrives, don't engage with it as an argument. It presents as an argument. It's not. Don't argue with a sensation. Mindfulness practice helps here: notice it and name it. "There's that guilt again." You don't have to follow where it leads.

What's built up: this kind of guilt lives in the body as tension, constriction, weight that doesn't lift. It needs a physical release: shaking (TRE), breathwork, movement, crying. Being with others helps because nervous systems co-regulate.

What generates it: the guilt comes from work that never tells you to stop. So you build stopping points yourself. Bounded hours, defined projects, rituals that mark endings. These give the signal the work can't give. The problem won't be solved by you, so let team wins count. Let other things matter on their own terms.^[2]

The goal isn't to stop caring. It's to keep caring without being destroyed by it.

1. ^{^}

   Things I didn’t feel that guilty about before getting involved in effective altruism

   ultimately, a lot of this is just sadness about not having an unlimited altruism budget

2. ^{^}

   Effective altruism in the garden of ends

   if I danced only to feel alive enough to work on EA Global, it wouldn’t have properly nourished me in practice