Should I feel bad about things?

Through talking to others over the years, I’ve learned that what I think of as my “conscience” is very different from the ordinary person’s conscience. While it is true that I do feel badly about certain things from time to time, they are almost never the same things that others continue to maintain that I should feel badly about.


Sometimes, when I am feeling particularly down, I look back on events from my past that I honestly regret:

• the fact that I borrowed money rather than earned money while in college
• the ignorant moment when I used the word “irregardless” in front of P in a non-ironic manner
• the continued purchases of video games that I could instead pirate & send the proceeds to needy families in Ethiopia

But other things, things that I intellectually realize are horrible in the extreme, are items that I feel almost nothing about at all. It is as though these events, while real, have no guilt component embedded in them, unlike the events listed in the earlier bulleted list. Still, though I feel no guilt, intellectually I understand that they are negative to some degree or another, and thus I take care to ensure that they never happen again. But no matter how many measures I take, one fact remains: I do not feel bad about having done them.

Some of these items include:

• losing control of my temper and destroying a dorm window w/ my bare hand, leaving others to pay the bill
• making fun of a fellow classmate nehind her back (longtime readers will remember her as Total Recall) just because I felt she was not a particularly ‘deep’ individual
• being physically violent with others in a most cruel and continual way during my first few formative relationships

But there is another class of items I do not feel bad about: things that, for one reason or another, I feel justified in not feeling badly about. Like looking at breasts, for instance. As I explained in detail in my feminist blog entry a few weeks back, I do not consider the looking at breasts to be a negative thing, despite the fact that I consider myself a fully fledged feminist. While some may believe that breast-gazing is equivalent to objectifying the generic female person, I disagree halfway: I think it objectifies only the female form, and so long as the gazer respects the person within that form, then no harm is done by looking. (Unless the recipient doesn’t wish to be looked at, in which case surreptitious gazing is a borderline case.)

But there are other items as well, including:

• looking at breasts, as aforementioned
• telling the truth in my public blog entries, even if they include another person
• claiming that I’ve been vegetarian for six years, even though I recently ate meat on purpose in a fit of depression (I justify this lie by being honest on this blog (and twitter) concerning it)
• not talking to nor particularly caring to get to know people who are, after all, my family by blood
• thinking God and religion in general is a plague on mankind that should be strictly controlled by atheistic forces
• not having nor desiring any contact w/ at least one genetic child of mine

The above list is just a sample of the many things I continue to do to this day, even while others I talk to continue to insist that it would feel wrong to them. Hearteningly, everyone seems to agree with me on one or two items, yet disagree on others–yet everyone seems to think different things are right. I should mention that I have what I think are rather good reasons for each of the above: many recently popular books have been written on how religion ruins society, for example, and the only real argument for me to pay special attention to those related to me by blood is because they share genetic material with me, and that’s got to be the lamest excuse ever. But even with these well thought out explanations, very few people have agreed with me on all points.

To tell the truth, this diversity of opinion makes me happy. Personally, I think engineering is exceedingly boring when compared to theoretical physics, but I fully understand that engineers are needed for physicists to work their magic. It’s a good thing that different people have different things they like. Yet I still appreciate beyond measure the rare individual who shares my thoughts on these issues. For it is only with those such people that I can ever fully let my guard down and participate openly, as equals.

And that is an experience that I will always treasure.