Operating System

Did you know that guilt and shame aren’t really the same thing?

Maybe you’re rolling your eyes at something I’ve only recently discovered that you’ve known for decades, but I honestly don’t even feel guilty for not knowing. I certainly don’t feel shame.

Guilt is when you feel bad because you did something wrong. Shame is when you feel bad because you’re you.

Back in the day—let’s call it 100,000 years ago—the human operating system developed a built-in feature called shame. This was extremely useful at the time, and under certain circumstances it helped to ensure the survival of our species. It was crucial that everyone belong to a tribe, since our survival depended on it. Acceptance by that tribe was literal life or death.

Now, I’m not about to write an ode to shame or anything like that! If anything, this is the opposite—but I want to point out that this emotion once served an important purpose, even though the world has now flown far past its utility. My favorite trauma to relive involves shame (maybe you remember this story).

While shame is outdated and antiquated, guilt continues to serve a useful purpose: to avoid undesirable behavior in the first place.

Thinking of our brains and bodies as operating systems can open some mental doorways that might not have been evident before. You might be able to find a little bit of stoic peace in understanding that you’re not always to blame for everything that your operating system screws up.

The important key is not to feel shame about these evolutionary quirks. After all, this isn’t really you: it’s your operating system. Shame is like one of those legacy software quirks like Clippy, always popping up to help you out when in reality it only ever causes frustration and harm.

Your operating system is flawed, but that doesn’t mean you can’t improve it, nor does it give you justification to blame all of your actions on it. Still, understanding that there’s a process running that can often get in the way of things can help you stay sane.

If you’ve ever heard yourself saying something to the effect of: I’m not a math person or I’m not very creative or maybe I’m bad with people, you have exhibited a fixed mindset. This is like tying your 2025 web browsing activities to Clippy, who’s eager to help you figure out how to navigate hot new sites like Netscape and AOL.

In other words, you’re not your operating system. Every time you feel bad about your own operating system, you’re probably feeling shame.

One more place where this operating system really causes us to get frustrated is with cognitive bias. This, too, has evolution to blame: we use helpful heuristics to shortcut our ability to think deeper about a problem. This gives us a much quicker answer (useful in the jungle), but the trade-off is that there’s no time for deeper thought before we make a decision.

The world is vastly more complex now than it was even a decade ago, and we need our full range of thinking tools to process everything that’s happening. We have to teach our knees not to jerk, in a manner of speaking.

All of this begins with self-reflection and self-awareness. In order to understand the lens through which you see the world, you need to take the time to dive into yourself. I’ve chosen to do much of this in public, so that’s why you’re seeing so much deeply personal writing from me lately, and I’m going to stop apologizing for that from now on.

I’ve updated my operating system so that these little guilty pleasures no longer make me feel guilty.