You and I are quite similar, in that we both default to taking responsibility for the painful outcomes that come our way. I do think though that there is a flaw in one little bit of this mindset (or maybe it’s just the way you expressed it, so tell me if I didn’t get what you were pointing at). It sounds like your formulation is basically “if an outcome is my responsibility, then I refuse to give myself compassion.” It is possible to accept a high degree of responsibility while still being compassionate to yourself. I know, because I have seen others do it well, and for my own mental health, one of my goals has been to get better at this.
I always find this much easier to apply to myself when I imagine that I’m applying it to a friend, or to a clone of myself, as I tend to be more compassionate to others than to myself. Could their fate have been avoided if they had been more vigilant? Yes, almost always. But you can’t be vigilant about everything, and you still need to take a break from self-flagellation long enough to actually live and get things done.
I might be entirely misunderstanding what you mean by compassion, though. The times that I have been less compassionate to myself than I would be to a stranger have usually been fairly extreme. It has been very valuable for me to do less of that kind of shame spiralling. Unproductive responsibility and shame spiralling can still sometimes be induced by someone important telling me that I am responsible and that I should feel bad. That’s a whole different set of problems though.
That doesn’t mean that I take any less responsibility, or don’t try as earnestly to learn from pain. Making ourselves suffer for our mistakes sometimes feels like a necessary step toward learning, but it does not have to be.
Wow! Thank you so, so much for all of this!
I tend to think of myself as very engaged with LW2.0 (despite not commenting or posting often) but I didn’t have a very good idea of how much work you were putting in to add features and fix bugs. I’d love to see more frequent posts like this, so we can all get excited together, and show appreciation for everything you and the team are doing. I’m sure that you have a very clear idea of all the features that are being implemented, and how much effort you’ve been pouring into it, but that isn’t always obvious to the occasional site users who haven’t been back for a while. I (and I would bet ~99% of LW) would love to see more updates and requests for support! Honestly, I look at what you’ve achieved this year, and my only concern is that you’re all doing too much for us and you’ll burn out. I’m not saying that’s definitely true, If that *IS* the case, could you please write a post at some point about how readers/contributors/commenters can help take some of the load?
Side note—in case you’re worried that what you’re doing isn’t having an impact on post volume and quality:
The constant addition of features on LW has directly inspired me to finally start sharing the blog posts I’ve written, and X-posting them on LW.