I've been feeling very guilty lately.

I moved in with my ex almost a year ago, and we got back together. We were both 18 and it was a great 6 months, but then she cheated on me. After a nasty breakup which ended with her somehow making me out to be the bad guy I fell into a deep depression.

Then I found out she was slandering me to our mutual friends. That was when I swore revenge.

After a month long campaign with my new allies at my back, I emerged as the clear victor. I finally made her cry a few days ago when I told her that her brother, whom she admires, knew she cheated and "Sometimes I wish you could have seen the look of disappointment on his face."

I feel like the fallout with her friends and family, the judgment, is warranted as a consequence of cheating, but I think I am still a bad person for leading the charge against her. Before all of this happened, before I swore revenge, I wondered if it would be worth it to get back at her. Only time can tell if it was worth it.

Damn, I feel guilty a lot. Since I've come to realize that if I spent more time with constructive things I could do and be so much more I've become acutely aware of how much I fail to do. I'm trying to remedy that but I'm fighting years of ingrained bad habits. I feel exactly like this person who wrote ESR does (or did, hopefully)

When I was a boy, pretty much everybody would call me ‘genius’. I got top grades in school and yadda-yadda. I am now but a shadow of what people would think of me: I have really hit the point where my brains alone can’t take me any further. I have to work hard, but I don’t know how.

Eric goes on to give some great advice, such as take up something which you can be competent but where your 'intelligence' doesn't much help.

Personally I try to deal with my guilt over my not living up to what I should be in two ways. One is to take some measure of pride in things that I have done, be it doing well at some shitty job or playing my favourite song on guitar, or even cooking an awesome looking and tasting dinner. If I can't think of anything I've done that I can be proud of then I try to do something that I can be proud of, like a writer combating writer's block.

Another is to try and meditate a little on the bigger picture. I often do this while I'm hanging out with my wife, playing video games together, realizing that I could fuck up damn near everything else in my life and this is all I would really need (my relationship with me wife, not the game.) I try not to look on my potential (good lord I've come to hate that term) in terms of others, such as my peers who have become doctors, lawyers, etc in the time I've dicked around after high school, or people like Stephan Wolfram who wrote three book son particle physics by the time he was 14. I look at my life and see that I probably still have time to become great at something and all I need is to develop discipline.

Anyway (or as my grandpa says it, 'Anah-whey'), I'm just rambling at this point because I spend far too much time feeling guilty and not enough time dealing with the source of that guilt.

My answer would be no, I don't, not really. And I've done some things most people would consider terrible, and some of them have happened quite recently.

Sometimes I have felt guilty. I posted on #askhubski a long time ago about assholes because I'd been complicit in a situation where my brother was a giant asshole to someone.

I guess in that situation the way I managed my guilt was to first, accept my accountability for the situation, and then move on. I try to learn from experiences but I don't try to beat myself up too badly about them once they have happened. It's not productive. It doesn't get you anywhere.

For instance, you feel guilty because you don't feel like you're living up to your standards. Well then why don't you start taking action towards living up to your standards instead of just passively sitting back and feeling bad about it? I guess that is how I manage my guilt. I don't let it ride me and I figure out what I need to do to stop feeling guilty, and I do it.

You can't help being privileged. That's a silly thing to feel guilty about. It's like, do you also mail your leftover food to children in Africa? No? But that doesn't make you feel guilty, right? Because it would be preposterous and unhelpful to mail them your food, and also probably very expensive. You should appreciate your situation, you should feel very very lucky, and you should make the most of it.

Life is not fair and some people are born with advantages. You cannot help that. Do not feel guilty over something you can do nothing about. If you are still feeling guilty about being privileged then find a way to use that privilege to help others and give back.

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I think guilt is a useless emotion that allows us to feel like we're doing something - feeling bad about something - instead of actually doing something about that thing.

Think of it this way; if you feel guilty, why? If it is because you're privileged, there's no point in degrading yourself, that's not helping anyone. Instead, try and help someone who isn't as privileged. If you are rich, contribute to charity, if you are well off and have time, volunteer at a soup kitchen. Use the privileges you have to help out the less fortunate.

I feel guilty for similar reasons, joelg236. I'm an upper middle class, white, intelligent male from suburban America. I'm attending college on the dollars of my parents, and I'm doing well. I'm not wasting any of the opportunity thrown at me, but I sure do feel guilty when many of my classmates work full time, go to to school full time, and are still in debt.

I don't know about the rest of the hubski community, but if any quality of me could best define who I am, it would be that I constantly try to better myself. I started as someone who had it bad (poor but hardworking broken family, bad at relationships with both women and men, and no self-declared goals among other things), but as the saying goes "the first step is to realize there is a problem". So I began to accept responsibility for my actions and thoughts. I started to want to think and act for myself and accept the consequences. I remember thinking for years that in order to get along with others I had to "go with the flow", as I said to a few people long ago. I have always been a skeptic but when I trusted people enough, it became easier to accept what they believe would best for me on faith alone. When I discovered that that I did better when I questioned logic for myself, it allowed me to accept responsibility.

Now, when I feel guilty, I study the situation and try to understand if I had in fact done something wrong. If I hadn't, I dismiss the guilt I was feeling because there is no rational argument that would correctly conclude that I was guilty. Sometimes the guilty will persist. In such a case I repeat the process again to see if I missed something. In it still persists I try to gather more information, Rinse and repeat.

If I had done something wrong, then I accept responsibility for my actions and try to make amends if possible. If not possible, then I try to accept that not everything can fixed. This sucks, but that's life sometimes. I try my best to move on and do better next time. I have learned from my mistakes, but that doesn't make it any less painful. Are you falling short in situations with aspects that are within your control? Yes? How are you going to fix it?