Hello! 👋🏽
Welcome to another issue of Long Way Home🏡, where I explore creativity and emotional intelligence.
With so many things going on with me professionally and personally, it's been challenging to find time to write pieces I am excited to share, but I knew when creating this newsletter, there would be easy weeks and there would be hard weeks. It's part of the game. And sticking with it during the hard weeks is the valuable skill I have the opportunity to develop here.
Here's to getting onto the other side of the next few hard weeks and hopefully enjoying the easier weeks beyond that. If you're feeling overwhelmed right now, I'm right there with you.
Let's get to the other side of it together.
In this week's LWH🏡:
💫 - When To Feel Guilty by Vandan Jhaveri
📃 - Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems by James Somers
📃 - Letter #34: On wanting by Ali Sontag (Letters from Home & Away)
Here's this week's essay.
When To Feel Guilty
Wait...am I a bad person?
We've all felt this.
Something cruel, manipulative, or selfish occurs to us and we're ashamed we could have had such a thought in the first place. Perhaps we wished harm on somebody we love or we contemplated cheating on an important exam or we toyed with the idea of being unfaithful. Whatever the offence, our understanding of ourselves molds and adapts to accommodate this new, despicable person.
We believe these thoughts don't occur to "good people", and since they occurred to us, we must not be "good people". Our entire sense of self is disrupted. Being seen as a decent, moral, upstanding citizen is critically important to our sense of self, and simply having an immoral thought fractures that sense of self immediately.
Guilt ensues.
Thinking vs. Doing
In those moments, we equate thinking an immoral thought to doing an immoral thing. Most of us feel as though the gap between those two is negligible; as though if we're not being careful, we may find ourselves coming to our senses in the middle of committing a horrible act after thinking about it.
Genuinely good and moral people are routinely racked with guilt for merely having a thought by which they were taken aback. This guilt, however, is misplaced and undeserved. Thinking a bad thought is completely different than behaving in a bad way.
When we think of bad people, we think of people who have done bad things. It wouldn't occur to us to condemn those who merely have had a bad thought. We refuse, however, to extend this logic to ourselves. A bad thought somehow categorizes us in the same way performing bad actions categorizes others.
Of course, entire essays could be dedicated to exploring the definitions of both "good" and "bad" and the parameters of morality, but I am leaving them purposely undefined. We all have an intuitive sense of what the words mean and the points being made will likely be more clear if we don't enforce a rigid definition.
Involuntary vs. Voluntary
In reality, though, that gap between thinking and doing is enormous. One major reason is control. We have little control over the thoughts that occur to us, whereas we have full control over acting a certain way. Thoughts occur to us involuntarily all day long, every single day. We act, however, in ways we believe are appropriate after setting intentions and carefully planning for desired outcomes. This deliberation is the major differentiator.
In this gap, at this fork in the road, we are absolved. Guilty are those who have involuntary thoughts and then voluntarily make the first steps to actualize them. One path of the fork leads us to a reality in which we nod along, plotting on how to materialize a bad thought, and the other to one in which we invalidate the thought and laugh it off as ridiculous and unhelpful. It's how we react at this crucial junction that determines our character.
This brings us to crux of the issue: being a bad person is an intentional, continuous process, not a static state we might accidentally find ourselves in. Guilt, therefore, should be securely fastened to bad actions we mindfully perform instead of thoughts we cannot control. We should instead feel reassured of our morality when we do cringe at our own thoughts. This verifies for us that our conscience and empathy is fully intact and active.
Using the Inverse
To describe the underestimated gap between thinking a bad thing and doing a bad thing, we can think of the opposite. We all understand there's a world of a difference between having a good thought and performing a good deed. We would never publicly celebrate somebody for merely thinking about doing a good thing. We intuitively recognize this takes a negligible amount of effort and benefits nobody. We also understand that performing the good deed would take much more effort than merely having the thought.
If this is true, then we should also not ostracize those that have bad thoughts, including ourselves. They were not effortfully brought on, and they harm nobody. What we need in those moments is empathy and compassion for ourselves, not guilt and shame for having the thought.
Healthy Self-Image
Guilt is a corrosive emotion. It's like water on stone—harmless in small doses, but over long periods of time can leave a gash the size of the Grand Canyon.
Many of us are completely unaware of the guilt we feel. We're routinely taught to feel guilty for things beyond our control. Parents who aren't careful or equipped use guilt to control the behaviour of their kids without realizing the devastating downstream consequences.
As previously mentioned, seeing ourselves as good and moral people is imperative to a healthy self-image. Our ability to go out into the world, be ourselves, and do important work is predicated on us believing our interventions will leave things better off than we found them. But believing we are good people won't happen overnight. It's an intentional act. It starts by identifying harmful self-talk and observing when we judge ourselves as bad people for bad thoughts. The same kinds of thoughts we all have, regardless of who we are or what we do.
We all deserve to feel a little less guilt in this guilt-ridden world. It holds us back from doing the best work we can and growing into the good people we all inherently are.
With Guilt,
Vandan🏡
@vandan_jhaveri
📃 - In a Jiffy
This article argues that the quicker we're able to complete tasks, the smaller the imagined burden of completing that task in our minds, which will then inspire us to begin and eventually finish more tasks.
There are plenty of important tasks I put off beginning because I imagine them to be giant, challenging, time-intensive tasks that are going to be tough to complete. I believe that because completing those tasks have been painful experiences in the past. Pushing myself to finish quickly would adapt my expectations and I'd end up completing more tasks over the long-term.
Check out the importance of finishing things quickly here.
📃 - Hay Day Blues
I wanted to share this beautifully written piece in which the writer shares a parallel they've noticed between athletes who are celebrated during their primes and quickly forgotten about and teenage TikTok influencers who seem to be living a lavish lifestyle right now but will eventually time out of the fame.
It's not unreasonable to imagine a generation of attractive young people who, in the next 5-10 years, maybe less, are unable to transition their careers into something sustainable and lucrative, leaving behind a trail of have-beens incapable of healthily (physically and mentally) maintaining the façade of a glamorous, fun, care-free lifestyle. Feeling like the world has replaced you is perilous, and they will likely spend the rest of their lives trapped, trying to relive the glory days now long gone.