[kakarot]

That is a good way to look at things.

Some people swear that imagining your future as a narrative, immersing yourself in it, can help you achieve your goals or illuminate flaws with your current plan.

And yet others swear this kind of thinking -- allowing ourselves to mentally reap the benefits of out labor before we actually complete it -- is harmful and satiates us to the point where we don't bother to achieve our goals because the rewards we seek are just an imaginative narrative away.

I find that each mentality suits different career paths and different people; there is no one correct answer.

But as for immersing yourself in past guilt...I find that this happens to me, and my rationality is that I deserve the guilt from my failures and misdeeds. That if I "live in the now" I am doing a disservice to those I may have wronged (even though they may have completely forgotten whatever it was by now and moved on).

I have trouble escaping this negative, self-hating mentality despite knowing it is folly.

It's easy for me to forgive myself for dropping the ball here and there, for missing opportunity, because I understand the power of negative vs positive thought loops. But it feels so selfish when I apply this mentality to my transgressions upon others. What do.

[jmcmichael]

Yes, I've struggled with very similar feelings about guilt over past misdeeds. I agree that feelings of guilt serve a critical function in modifying our future behavior such that we never do the actions that lead to us feeling guilty in the present moment.

However, those feelings of guilt become dysfunctional after we've learned our lesson. After we experience guilt, and resolve never to do again what caused the feelings of guilt, then we can let those feelings go - they've done their job. If they keep coming back, there exist practices which can take us deeper to reveal the obfuscated reasons for their recurrence. No reason to keep torturing one's self after the lesson has been learned.

[olejorgenb]

> But as for immersing yourself in past guilt...I find that this happens to me, and my rationality is that I deserve the guilt from my failures and misdeeds. That if I "live in the now" I am doing a disservice to those I may have wronged (even though they may have completely forgotten whatever it was by now and moved on).

> ...

> But it feels so selfish when I apply this mentality to my transgressions upon others.

I can relate.

I think that a certain amount of guilt is good, but it's not at all obvious how much is optimal. The guilt in itself doesn't help the ones hurt. I suspect strongly it's a lot less than people frequently immersing them-self in guilt employs though. Just accepting that it's a very hard optimization problem in a very uncertain domain is probably a good idea.

The appropriate amount of guilt is just enough to change future behavior. That is assuming the remorsed misdeed actually was our fault and not due due to circumstances out of our control.

The less clear the situation around the misdeed is, the less guilt is helpful. If it's hard to pinpoint what we actually could've done differently it's hard to induce change.

The best apology is changed behavior, etc.

Repeated micro-guilt is probably better than longer sessions of self-loating. (assoc.: spaced repetition) (Again - assuming high certainty about the nature of the misdeed - meaning also an initial analysis of the situation have been done)

Sometimes it's best to simply talk to the one we suspect we hurt :) Not always easy though.

In general it's frustrating how ineffective rationalizing such things is - personally I haven't found a better approach though.

A final assoc: one-line quotes like "Live in the now" is highly (lossy) compressed advises.