A week ago my shitty hands hand slipped while soldering a mesh radio board, irrecoverably ruining it, and I'm STILL fucking beating myself up about it and thinking about how many deaths in a civil war situation that single ruined board could make me responsible for.

I tend to think that every emotion has a purpose, and guilt's purpose is to drive finding the root cause of your mistakes and alter yourself to avoid such going forward. But a lot of things can make guilt spiral out of control.

I have a lot of disdain for the common mistake of treating guilt as part of some kind of retributive or restorative deontological evaluation. A lot of people assume that embracing the negative emotion of guilt = ethically restoring some balance or fulfilling a duty.

Guilt should exist insofar as one's values/care obliges a bayesian update. It has a role. But that role is ideally to effect changes so that you make decisions and have consequences that *don't* make you feel guilty. Existing in a state of painful guilt isn't being ethical.

But trauma, stress, overwhelming calculations -- branching possibilities that are hard to even loosely map much less apply probabilities to -- can make guilt also runaway into seizing up. I'm trying to reboot my brain by zoning out with theory books, star wars, etc, but...

...There's an avoidance spiral that can lock you up too. You take the pseudo-opiates to kill off the guilt spiral, but then by the time your mind is free of the guilt you're so braindead that you can't properly head off the seeds of the guilt spiral from starting again.

Come to think of it, there's also probably just the sense of there being so few things I can productively contribute right now to alter probabilities out in the world. Me and my partner are fragile and strongly quarantined, they're in pain, tangible actions are not possible.

I've long cited how when the Spanish revolution kicked off Durruti had nothing to do besides wash dishes at home because new generations had taken things up and he was out of place. I like that image of sacrificing for decades to end up just helping by washing dishes.

I felt a little of that early in the uprising during this quarantine. But the reality is, right now? Right now I feel overwhelming guilt in every direction. Frantically toothless before the approaching storm. It's a paralyzing kind of sadness and desperation.

Adrenaline will kick in at some point and there will be no time for guilt over all the mistakes I made, all the projects I never finished doing, no time to spin out evaluating possible consequences. But for now? Fuck but this sucks.