This isn’t directly responding to you, more like a cached thing-I-wanted-to-share-that-I-was-slightly-wary-of-sharing-as-a-top-level-post, but which feels relevant.
I notice a lot of people in my social circles having a pretty strong “shame is bad” orientation, which makes sense, because I think overuse and abuse of shame has deeply hurt a lot of people. I think there’s an overall pendulum swing against it that makes sense as a knee jerk reaction.
The ideal, longterm steady state probably looks something like you’re pointing at here (whether this particular method works, in general ‘people should develop emotional processing skills’, and a world where people learn that better seems like a world that overall makes much better use of the human emotional spectrum, including parts that people experience as negative-valence)
But...
...even without sophisticated emotional processing, I’ve found myself swing my own personal pendulum back towards “actually shame is pretty fine and useful, and I should probably be employing it slightly more on the margin.” It’s a bit tricky because I think it depends at least somewhat on group norms.
The crystallizing moment for me was when I worked at Spotify, and there (used to be) an office norm where if you left your laptop open, in such a way that an employee could gain access to it, they would open your email client and send the office a message saying “coffee and donuts are on me!” and then you had to buy coffee/donuts for your team. (the idea was the encourage people to treat security seriously)
My team leader mentioned this soon after I got hired, and I sort of nodded, but didn’t really change my behavior munch.
Then, a couple weeks later, I did leave my laptop open. And someone sent an email from my account. And when I found out, I got a spike of shame...
...and I never did it again (at least while working at Spotify).
And that gave me a crisp sense of when shame was supposed to be for – implementing simple group norms.
I think the failure of shame in wider society has to do with a) some cultures/religions using shame as a weird weapon where they make basically anything fun or sexual shameful, in a way that is not actually healthy. b) in melting-pot civilizations, you don’t even get the the thing where “there’s a simple set of rules you can learn”, instead there’s a bunch of overlapping rules and you don’t know what you’re going to get socially punished for.
It’s a potent tool, and that’s what makes it dangerous and important to weird carefully, wisely, sparingly.
This isn’t directly responding to you, more like a cached thing-I-wanted-to-share-that-I-was-slightly-wary-of-sharing-as-a-top-level-post, but which feels relevant.
I notice a lot of people in my social circles having a pretty strong “shame is bad” orientation, which makes sense, because I think overuse and abuse of shame has deeply hurt a lot of people. I think there’s an overall pendulum swing against it that makes sense as a knee jerk reaction.
The ideal, longterm steady state probably looks something like you’re pointing at here (whether this particular method works, in general ‘people should develop emotional processing skills’, and a world where people learn that better seems like a world that overall makes much better use of the human emotional spectrum, including parts that people experience as negative-valence)
But...
...even without sophisticated emotional processing, I’ve found myself swing my own personal pendulum back towards “actually shame is pretty fine and useful, and I should probably be employing it slightly more on the margin.” It’s a bit tricky because I think it depends at least somewhat on group norms.
The crystallizing moment for me was when I worked at Spotify, and there (used to be) an office norm where if you left your laptop open, in such a way that an employee could gain access to it, they would open your email client and send the office a message saying “coffee and donuts are on me!” and then you had to buy coffee/donuts for your team. (the idea was the encourage people to treat security seriously)
My team leader mentioned this soon after I got hired, and I sort of nodded, but didn’t really change my behavior munch.
Then, a couple weeks later, I did leave my laptop open. And someone sent an email from my account. And when I found out, I got a spike of shame...
...and I never did it again (at least while working at Spotify).
And that gave me a crisp sense of when shame was supposed to be for – implementing simple group norms.
I think the failure of shame in wider society has to do with a) some cultures/religions using shame as a weird weapon where they make basically anything fun or sexual shameful, in a way that is not actually healthy. b) in melting-pot civilizations, you don’t even get the the thing where “there’s a simple set of rules you can learn”, instead there’s a bunch of overlapping rules and you don’t know what you’re going to get socially punished for.
It’s a potent tool, and that’s what makes it dangerous and important to weird carefully, wisely, sparingly.
May 2018 Brienne post, “In Defense of Shame”
whoa i totally forgot i wrote that