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Social Guilt

  
 
This Sunday
21:23 / 22.07.07
So, recent threads have got me thinking about the things society makes us feel guilty or suspicious about, and there doesn't seem (a) be a decent thread to cover this, without rotting a pre-existing, and (b) Conversation seemed the best place, to keep it light and friendly.

I often feel guilty that I drink alcohol. Firstly, I feel guilty because with my racial background, y'know, it's just understood that one sip of the hard stuff will turn me into a depraved drunken alcoholic. It's silly and pointless and untrue, but it doesn't stop some people from making a joke about it, if I'm out somewhere and they know I'm Native American, and worse, some people really think they're being helpful by counseling me away from it, because my genes can't handle or something. Secondly, while I am not an excessive drinker, I don't get hangovers, and hangovers, we are told, are like the shitty t-shirt you get for going somewhere fabulous or interesting. Between these two, I'm definitely damned for doing or not enough, I guess.

I feel guilty for eating horrible foods, all the time, in large quanitites, and not really gaining weight. Again, weight is the badge of proper enjoyment in popular myth. Thin is asceticism and restraint, or something to be worked really hard at.

I feel bad for coming out tops of the only real fight I've had in my adult life, because I walked away through 'not fighting fair' and we all know, if somebody takes a swing at you, the manly, correct thing to do is to keep it to punches. Sticking a cigarette in their eye, messing up their leg, and walking away is uncivilised. Feeling horrible about it a few blocks away and getting ill to one's stomach... that's just undignified.

I feel guilty for being light-skinned, sometimes, especially around certain branches of family.

When people tell me my hair looks nice, I feel guilty for using the cheapest shampoos and conditioners. When someone tells me I'm good looking or, as a previous roommate was fond of, 'too good looking', I feel guilty, as though I've put myself above some station, despite not feeling at all good looking more than once every couple months. Same for compliments on intelligence, kindness, or patience. As though I've somehow lazily slipped out of my level and I ought to hurry back before I get caught out of ranks.

None of which stops me from being, at turns, proud of all these things, delusionally or reasonably. I'm still trying to work that one out.

So, what does it for y'all? What uncontrollable thing does it feel like society's holding against you, or ought to hold against you? What mythical trespasses have you committed and thus angst over?
 
 
*
01:32 / 23.07.07
When I need to correct someone about my pronouns, and they apologize—often profusely—I feel terribly guilty and ashamed for the inconvenience and embarrassment my gender and my appearance have caused them. This is why I desperately prefer just a simple "sorry; he" over the profuse apologies and awkward explanations I often get. (Quite aside from how often those explanations end up straying into territory like "Oh, it's just that you're far too gentle for me to think of you as a man...")

There's plenty more, but that's the one that most stands out to me.
 
 
Leigh Monster loses its cool
02:23 / 23.07.07
I feel guilty for not feeling guilty about a whole lot of sex and sex-related things. Many of my friends and family seem to expect a certain amount of shame to go along with sexuality, and I can tell that they sometimes think less of me for being shameless about sex and sex-related encounters (although I'm always safe and try not to hurt feelings).

I also feel really guilty when I don't like people, especially if those people aren't overtly bad people but just people I don't find particularly interesting.
 
 
Mysterious Transfer Student
07:41 / 23.07.07
Leigh's last comment resonates for me to some extent in that I experience a certain amount of guilt over never wanting to socialize with people from work. I'm an amateur social phobic of long standing (more about this here) and can't quite separate my generalised aversion to spending time with others from the fact that I don't, honestly, enjoy the company of many people I work with. There's also the fact that I have trouble maintaining professional respect for people who I have to see falling down drunk. And that of course plays into yet another overriding guilt trip of mine, that I'm a narcissistic, pompous, solipsistic elitist arsehole who deserves no better than to be locked in a trunk with a copy of The Matrix Warrior for rest of his life.

Zippy, I don't know you IRL, but I can recall one occasion when you asked people here not to refer to you using gender-neutral pronouns and it caused me in particular to stop short and realize that for some people, they didn't want their gender identity disregarded or glossed over but instead thought of it as something they'd fought hard to establish and have recognized. I don't mean to insist that this is your position or that you are obliged always to refer to such matters in your interactions on or off the board, but for my part it made me give a lot more thought to gender and trans issues than I had previously. So I think that you need not feel guilty for making any statement that causes more, not less thought.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
09:30 / 23.07.07
A while ago, I would have said that "society makes you feel far too guilty about the wrong things, and not nearly guilty enough about the right things", but now I see my thoughts were at an infancy then. Now I reject and thumb my nose at the whole concept of "guilt as in feeling guilty" en totale; it came in with Christianity and although there are good and bad things about that religion, "guilt as in feeling guilty" is one of the worst.

In French there is a word for "guilt as in guilty of having done a crime", but no word for "guilt as in feeling guilty". This is why Baudelaire is better than Betjeman, and why people who make weight-loss products have to jump through hoops if they want to make French slogans.

Guilt is the pointless, unnecesary side of the coin, the other side of which is "awareness of one's actions and their repercussions", it is the fool's version of "social responsibility".

I'd rather that the people who burgled my house when I was a child were aware of the effect it had and of the trouble they caused, then resolved not to do it again, than that they felt like bad people.
 
 
Shiny: Well Over Thirty
15:51 / 23.07.07
What I tend to frequently feel socially guilty about is my total lack of interest in what I suppose might be termed as everyday conversation, especially when people are talking about themselves. I can chat about politics or philosophy, or metaphysics, or alternately Buffy, Doctor Who or comic books quite happily, but when people start talking about their lives, I tend to either go very quiet or if I’m in an uncharitable to start speaking complete gibberish, just to try and change the direction of the conversation. I’m especially bad with strangers – if someone I don’t know starts trying to talk to me about something I’m not interested in then they probably aren’t going to get more than a series of grunts out of me. This isn’t necessarily a hard and fast rule – if someone has a very exiting life, or one that I actually have a practical connection to then I’ll probably be interested.

I’m well aware this can make me seem rude or stand-offish, and I’d rather it didn’t, but I really don’t seem to have the ability to feign interest in conversations I’m not interested in. I suspect the whole thing developed as a self-defence mechanism, because in some ways I’ve been shockingly shy my whole life, and wouldn’t necessarily be capable of involving myself in these conversations even if I wanted to, but it still leaves me feeling guilty when I’ve had to extricate myself from that sort of conversation, because society seems to expect people to make small talk with people about things they have absolutely no interest in simply for the sake of saying words on a regular basis.
 
 
Ticker
20:03 / 23.07.07
I often feel guilty for having a shit ton of resources and options and not really doing anything with them. Like basic adult things like a savings account or retirement fund or why with the organic raw dairy full of happy cows nearby am I too lazy to make my own icecream.

I think I mostly feel guilty about lack of accomplishments that I'm supposed to have done.
 
  
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