dylannevans
commented
2 years ago No. Guilt and Shame are not the goal (see historic distinctions here). I'm trying to avoid connoting either. There are two deep truths I'm trying to communicate: every person is
- far from ideal, sucks a lot, fails a lot, and will almost certainly continue to.
- valuable, worthwhile, and worth loving.
Often shame and guilt are used to indicate denial of the second truth because of the first, often through the lie that failing in a particular way diminishes someone's objective value. As a society, we have applied a lot of value-judgement on failure, even using it as a noun to describe someone for whom failure is an observable pattern. Part of this lie is the false belief that each person's objective value is some sort of weighted sum of the value provided to the people around them: if nobody around you finds you valuable at the moment, you must be worthless. This truth also addresses that lie, with :s/lose/fail/g.
Also, the value-judgement on failure is based on assumptions about that person's goals (usually that the failer's goals are the same as the judger's goals). If loving someone means wanting what's good for them, that depends on knowing them and their goals.
I wish there was a term that meant "non-ideal outcome" without the baggage of "failure" so I could use that instead, but I can't think of one. I suspect that failure's baggage is tied to the idea, and so wordsmithing just won't address the core problem I'm trying to address.
There's a lot of language (especially in "My Failure") associated with shame. Are you trying to communicate that we should be ashamed of ourselves?