I felt guilty yesterday for enjoying my coffee while reading about disasters in the news.
This happens a lot. You’re having a good time, then remember something awful exists somewhere, and suddenly your pleasure feels wrong. Selfish. Like you’re betraying the suffering by not suffering too.
But this makes no sense.
Your misery doesn’t reduce anyone else’s misery. Your guilt doesn’t help the people you’re feeling guilty about. If anything, it wastes the good thing you had and creates more bad feeling in the world.
We act like happiness is a finite resource. Like there’s only so much to go around, and taking some means less for others. But that’s not how it works. Your joy doesn’t steal joy from someone else.
The confusion runs deeper though. We treat feeling good as morally suspicious, but feeling bad as virtuous. Guilt signals you care. Pleasure signals you’re shallow.
This gets it backwards. The person who can find genuine pleasure in simple things—coffee, sunlight, conversation—isn’t ignoring the world’s problems. They’re modeling what we’re trying to create more of.
The goal isn’t for everyone to feel as bad as the worst-off person. The goal is for everyone to have access to the good feelings that are possible.
Your guilt about enjoying your coffee doesn’t honor suffering. It just creates more of what we already have too much of.