"I confess, I do not know what it would mean for somebody to be a "bad  person." I do know what it means for somebody to be bad at achieving  the goals they set for themselves. I do know what it means for someone  to be good at pursuing goals that I dislike. I have no idea what it  would mean for a person to "be bad." I know what it means for a person to lack skill in a specific area. I  know what it means for a person to be procrastinating. I know what it  means for a person to be acting...

"To close the gap between compassion and self-compassion, I offer two  tools. The first is a reminder that self-compassion is not the same  thing as self-pity, and nor is it the same thing as making excuses for  yourself. It is well possible to feel self-compassion even while  thinking that you are not moving fast enough. It is perfectly possible  to feel self-compassion even as you notice that you're completely  failing to act as you wish to." -------- Original post:...

"Most people don't think they "could" cure Alzheimers by snapping  their fingers, and so they don't feel terrible about failing to do this. By contrast, people who fail to resist overeating, or who fail to  stop playing Civilization at a reasonable hour, feel strongly that they  "could have" resisted, and take this as a license to feel terrible about  their decisions. As I said last week, most people have broken "coulds.  Willpower is scarce in this world. Sometimes, you can will yourself...

"You probably don't feel guilty for failing to snap your fingers in just such a way as to produce a cure for Alzheimer's disease. Yet, many people do feel guilty for failing to work until they drop every single day (which is a psychological impossibility). They feel guilty for failing to magically abandon behavioral patterns they dislike, without practice or retraining (which is a cognitive impossibility). What gives?" -------- Original post: http://mindingourway.com/not-yet-gods/ Find...

"Here's a mental technique that I find useful for addressing many dour feelings, guilt among them: When you're feeling guilty, it is sometimes helpful to close your  eyes for a moment, re-open them, and pretend that you're a new  homunculus." -------- Original post: http://mindingourway.com/be-a-new-homunculus/ Find Nate Soares at http://mindingourway.com Find Gianluca Truda at http://gianlucatruda.com Replacing Guilt is written by Nate Soares and produced, with permission, by Gianluca...

"The most common objection I hear when helping people remove their  guilt is something along the lines of "Hey wait! I was using that!" Believing this (or really any variant of "but guilt is good for me!")  makes it fairly hard to replace guilt with something more productive..." -------- Original post: http://mindingourway.com/update-from-the-suckerpunch/ Find Nate Soares at http://mindingourway.com Find Gianluca Truda at http://gianlucatruda.com Replacing Guilt is written by Nate Soares...

"I've spoken at length about shifting guilt or dispelling guilt. What I haven't talked about, yet, is guilt itself. So let's talk about guilt. Guilt is one of those strange tools that works by not occurring. You place guilt on the branches of possibility that you don't want to happen, and then, if all goes well, those futures don't occur. Guilt is supposed to steer the future towards non-guilty futures; it's never supposed to be instantiated in reality." -------- Original post:...

"The posts so far have been less about confronting guilt, and more about different tools for shifting it. This is a valuable skill to generalize. The posts in this series have developed three such tools for shifting guilt. In this post, I'll recast those three tools as members of the same family, so that you can start to see the pattern, and develop similar tools from the same family as you need them. The tools that I have described so far shift guilt to one particular place: guilt about...

"Many people seem to think the 'good' state of being, the 'ground' state, is a relaxed state, a state with lots of rest and very little action. Because they think the ground state is the relaxed state, they act like maintaining any other state requires effort, requires suffering. This is a failure mode that I used to fall into pretty regularly. I would model my work as a finite stream of tasks that needed doing. I'd think "once I've done the laundry and bought new shoes and finished the...

"Part 1 was about replacing the listless guilt: if someone feels vaguely guilty for not really doing anything with their life, then the best advice I can give is to start doing something. Find something to fight for. Find a way that the world is not right, and decide to change it. Once the guilt is about failing at a specific task, then we can start addressing it. Part 2 was about refusing to treat your moral impulses as obligations. Be wary of the word should, which tries to force an...

"I have a friend who, after reading my last two posts, still struggled to give up her shoulds. She protested that, if she stopped doing things because she should, then she might do the wrong thing. I see this frequently, even among people who claim to be moral relativists: they protest that if they weigh their wants and their shoulds on the same scales, then they might make the wrong choice." -------- Original post: http://mindingourway.com/shoulds-are-not-a-duty/ Find Nate Soares...

"A few months ago, a friend of mine was describing her motivational issues to me. As an example, she explained she was having trouble making herself clean her room, despite her dissatisfaction with the constant messiness. I asked: "Have you considered just not forcing yourself?"" -------- Original post: http://mindingourway.com/not-because-you-should/ Find Nate Soares at http://mindingourway.com Find Gianluca Truda at http://gianlucatruda.com Replacing Guilt is written by Nate Soares...

"My last few posts have been aimed at addressing what I call the "listless guilt," the vague sense of guilt that stems from not doing anything in particular. I said: The listless guilt is a guilt about not doing anything. To remove it, we must first turn it into a guilt about not doing something in particular. If you didn't have a listless guilt, or if you did and the last few posts worked for you, then you may now find yourself wrestling with a very pointed sort of guilt that stems from not...

"A number of my recent posts may have given you the impression that I know exactly what I'm fighting for. If someone were to ask you, "hey, what's that Nate guy trying so hard to do," you might answer something like "increase the chance of human survival," or "put an end to unwanted death" or "reduce suffering" or something. This isn't the case. I mean, I am doing those things, but those are all negative motivations: I am against Alzheimer's, I am against human extinction, but what am I...

"In my last post, I said that in order to address the listless guilt, step zero is believing that you can care about something, and step one is finding something to care about. This post is about step one." -------- Original post: http://mindingourway.com/caring-about-some/ Find Nate Soares at http://mindingourway.com Find Gianluca Truda at http://gianlucatruda.com Replacing Guilt is written by Nate Soares and produced, with permission, by Gianluca Truda. The theme music is a remix of...

"The first sort of guilt I want to address is the listless guilt, that vague feeling one gets after playing video games for twelve hours straight, a guilty feeling that you should be doing something else. Many people in my local friend group don't suffer from the listless guilt, because many people in my sphere are effective altruists who feel a very acute and specific sense of guilt when they think they've spent their time poorly. Specific guilt tends to be as bad or worse than the listless...

"Once upon a time, a group of naïve philosophers found a robot that collected trinkets. Well, more specifically, the robot seemed to collect stamps: if you presented this robot with a choice between various trinkets, it would always choose the option that led towards it having as many stamps as possible in its inventory. It ignored dice, bottle caps, aluminum cans, sticks, twigs, and so on, except insofar as it predicted they could be traded for stamps in the next turn or two. So, of course,...

Transcript: http://mindingourway.com/failing-with-abandon/ -------- "Over and over, I see people set themselves a target, miss it by a little, and then throw all restraint to the wind. "Well," they seem to think, "willpower has failed me; I might as well over-indulge." I call this pattern "failing with abandon." But you don't have to fail with abandon. When you miss your targets, you're allowed to say "dang!" and then continue trying to get as close to your target as you...

Transcript: http://mindingourway.com/half-assing-it-with-everything-youve-got -------- I worry that guilt and shame are unhealthy long-term motivators. In many of my friends, guilt and shame tend to induce akrasia, reduce productivity, and drain motivation. So over the next few weeks, I'll be writing a series of posts about removing guilt/shame motivation and replacing it with something stronger. -------- Find Nate Soares at http://mindingourway.com Find Gianluca Truda at...

Transcript: http://mindingourway.com/replacing-guilt -------- In my experience, many people are motivated primarily by either guilt, shame, or some combination of the two. Some are people who binge-watch television, feel deeply guilty about it, and convert that guilt into a burning need to Actually Do Something on the following day. Others are people who feel guilty whenever they stop working before they literally fall over from exhaustion, and in attempts to avoid that guilty feeling, they...