Important Quotes:

• “We are a meaning-seeking species. We tend to process events in light of what they mean to us. We make a value judgment: Is it good or bad in the context of my life? And it is a human habit to infer deliberate intention to events in self-referential ways.” - Ralph Lewis
• “Our guilt festers and turns into shame. It becomes something horrifying and gross and must be concealed and defended from anyone who would otherwise expose it. And it’s this hiding that ultimately hurts us. Because what this hiding looks like in real life is a deflection of responsibility. It looks like passive aggression. It looks like manipulation and unwillingness to trust. It corrodes and poisons our relationships and destroys our ambitions. And as any addict will tell you, overwhelming amounts of shame can slowly murder us from the inside-out." - Mark Manson
• “You (hopefully) don’t go around sleeping with your friends’ partners and shitting in supermarket aisles because you fear social punishment. And that is a healthy fear—that threat of feeling ashamed keeps you, your genitals, and your bowels in check. While shame functions to keep you from doing stupid or awful things, guilt similarly motivates us to right our wrongs. When we feel guilty about something, we often set out to make it right. We apologize and in some cases, we offer ways to fix it. This feels bad. But this is also healthy. Expressing guilt for our transgressions and setting a course of corrective action shows others that:

1. We know the rules and we know we broke them, and
2. We care about others in the group enough to try to fix things.
In short, shame and guilt solve a big problem inherent to living in larger social groups: they help regulate the behavior of the entire group at the level of the individual." -Mark Manson

Key Takeaways:

• Guilt often can arise from making promises we know we cannot keep just to appease someone.
• It is our own guilt that haunts our minds and makes us seek out confirmation in our environment.

References:

• Banishing A Ghost: https://truecenterpublishing.com/zenstory/ghost.html
• Coming to Terms With Coincidence: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/202002/coming-terms-coincidence
• The Best Way to Resolve Your Shame: https://markmanson.net/shame