Guilt is Free, Pride is Impossible
Why I don't feel pride in things, but you should not use my criteria
written on day 23/30 of inkhaven, reflecting on older journal entries while on a train
I have some weird feelings on when I can feel pride about something. At some point, I wrote most of these ideas down, and I don’t really endorse this as a good way to think of pride, but it is descriptive of how I end up feeling. I think there are a few main factors which are, to some extent, anti-correlated with each other, to the point of being useless and impossible.
However, I would have no issue in feeling guilt for most things. If I did not do as well as I could, I just feel guilt for not having done better. People have managed to convince me that feeling as much guilt as I want, but not feeling any pride is not good. I have somewhat gotten better, but I guess it’s hard to control how you emotionally react criteria.
A lot of this discussion is based on extracts from my old journals, which has been cleaned up, but maybe captures more about how I used to feel about pride than exactly how I feel about it now.
I would probably also split pride into two kinds of forms: *weak pride* which is when you have just done something and are locally kind of happy with the results immediately and want to show it to people, but more like “oh yeah I did this thing it was kinda fun or interesting or something”, which I guess I contrast to *strong pride* which is vaguely some feeling that your life has been valuable and worthwhile.
I do sometimes feel some sense of the former, even if “pride” is not quite the word I would use, but I basically never feel the latter.
feeling strong pride in things
It feels like when some people look back on parts of their lives, they feel particularly proud to have done some thing. I do sometimes tell people i did something that was interesting, but almost always, it feels like it “just kinda happened, mostly luck” rather than it being something that i really can feel proud about.
Often it’s a fague reflection that I feel I could have done better, as it is almost always true that I could do better what I know now. That sure, maybe I can tell people I did something impressive, but I usually really really really don’t want them to think that I am any more impressive than I actually am, I must caveat that no, I actually made so and so mistakes in the process, I don’t feel like I personally succeeded. Sometimes the story is fun, but I don’t feel it’s fair to show people the parts that are fun without at least mentioning that there were huge moments where I just completely failed countless times due to in-competencies on my part.
What are some examples?
I did some random interesting projects a few times, but I see an idea, I try to execute on the idea, it kinda works or something, I managed to do something. But mostly I guess I just did whatever it was because I felt like it, not sure what there is to be proud about.
Sometimes I even work on projects, or organize things, or help people specifically. And sometimes people even tell me they really like these things. It is nice to hear affirmation that the things I did were not completely useless. But I just don’t really feel the pride in internal any of these things really.
I don’t really feel pride in being vegan or giving 10% pledge, I just think “wow, I could have done it sooner, I could have been more effective and done more, I only do it because it makes me feel better.” that it is just some minimum bar.
Idk there are other examples1 but I don’t really feel any pride about anything
Others feeling pride
I heard one person telling me she wrote some simple software for herself as a fun project. She used it for a while, shared it with a few friends. Then later, it later got popular somehow, and even got used in some clinical trial. But instead of feeling pride, she mostly just feels guilty that people are using what she considers a badly written extension. Wants it to be taken down from the internet and not used by anyone.
I guess feel that she should not feel guilty, that she just provided a net-positive thing, that other extensions are not as good as she imagines.
But at the same time, I would feel the same way in her shoes too.
I spent most of my life just vibing, doing things for me, doing whatever the most obvious next action is, making things just good enough for me. And it feels undeserved to be praised for something I don’t think I deserve to be praised for. Or thinking that I might have actually made things worse.
My impossible criteria
I think if I break it down, the criteria I have for feeling strong pride are something like:
must involve some level of intent and personal sacrifice, through your own actions, that you have a good idea about in advance. it should feel difficult in the moment.
must be doing some amount of good that is larger than the sacrifice, preferably much larger, otherwise you’re just wasting utilons.
that your specific action was counterfactual. nobody else would have stepped in, the good thing would not have happened if not for you.
that you really tried your best at it, there is no sense in which you feel like you could have done better, that there was no easier way to achieve the same thing.
I think in general, you should probably be aiming criteria 2 and 3, The first is more of a potential correlate of “things to feel proud about” rather than a criterion, the 4th does not tradeoff diminishing returns. However, if I were to want to emotionally feel pride, I would need all 4 criteria. And I would probably endlessly debate about how criterion 4 and 3 were not achieved.
Nothing makes me feel proud. What is pride? What have I done that is actually good? I did not pull myself up from my bootstraps. I just watched some videos and got convinced by people, and sometimes this lead me to do the good thing. I was not curious or agentic and didn’t do it sooner. I do not have the social awareness to see the suffering in the world on my own. I did not find opportunities to do good.
I think others should feel worthy if they are doing good things with their life, but I don’t really feel worthy of it myself. I guess I have some similarities to other EAs. But at least those people achieved something of note, unlike me.
I have some mixed up emotions about this all. I have gotten better. The only reason I have to feel better, is this that I want my friends to be happy, and I know that by Evidential Decision Theory, that since many of my friends are similar to me, that them being the kinds of people who can be happy, also means me being the type of person who can be happy too. So I try to do that sometimes. And it helps.
I still don’t feel strong pride in anything I have done, but I guess I feel a bit less guilt about the things I didn’t manage to do. I get sad sometimes, but less than before.
A couple more examples, I’m not sure how useful these are.
Sure, I competed internationally in IMO and IChO. But to me, it feels like I managed to spend a couple weeks in a burst for both to barely make the team, and I didn’t didn’t put in work beyond that to do particularly well at either competition, and mostly focused parts of the curriculum that were fun at the training camps. Ireland is also relatively non-competitive for Olympiads such that the achievement just doesn’t feel that impressive and I kinda just faked the badge of impressiveness by going. It is something I tell people who might want to hire me as a legible signal, but I kinda just look back and feel shame that I didn’t try harder to do well, that I could have studied more effectively, that it taught me the wrong lessons, etc.
I started wearing cat ears at some point in my life, and it made my life better. People tell me it’s like brave or something, I don’t really see it? I feel like it was bad that it took me so long of over-valuing how much i tried to control people’s reactions to me, and that I was so convincing at rationalizing things to myself. I guess I just tried it for a while, it made my life better. But I feel like I am just imposing social costs on others sometimes too.