In 2023, I had too much on my plate. To be honest, that’s been true for most of my adult life, but 2023 was when I actually sat with it.
Work projects, finances, psychology research (don’t ask), exercise routines, new technology, new shows. I had built a careful system around all of it. A routine that felt like it was moving me somewhere.
Then I had to travel.
A week away from home, somewhere I didn’t particularly want to be. I couldn’t do even a fraction of what I normally did. By the first afternoon, a feeling I recognized immediately had settled in: guilt. Not the guilt of having done something wrong. The other kind. Productivity guilt. The sense that by stepping away, I was somehow betraying my own ambitions.
My first explanation was quick: this is just the cost of doing business. Sometimes life demands compromises. Pay the toll, move on. I was confident in that for about a day.
Then I realized it was a shitty take.
What I had actually done was cast the people around me as obstacles. Distractions that delayed my goals. That can’t be right. After all, isn’t time with family supposed to feel rewarding? Isn’t connection one of the things I’m building toward in the first place? I thought I was missing something. So I sat with the feeling instead of explaining it away.
What I found was that my productive self was checking in. A part of me that had spent years building a system, watching the schedule fall apart, registering the disruption. Not punishing me. Just present.
“Identity dissonance”, is what I later found out it was called. The friction between who I’ve been showing up as and who I am in this moment.
The tax framing came from sitting with that. We pay taxes on what we earn, not because we did something wrong, but because we participated. The more we earn, the more we pay. Guilt works the same way: the more we’ve invested in building something for ourselves, the louder it gets when we step away. Like a structural feature of having standards. we can’t eliminate it without eliminating the drive that created it.
And here’s the thing I had to sit with a bit longer: I don’t want to eliminate it.
The productive part of me is not some old self I need to update past. It’s not a bug. It’s me. And so is the part that wants to be at that table, actually present, listening to my family argue about something meaningless, eating food I didn’t cook, laughing at jokes that only make sense inside this specific group of people. Both are me. Neither is more correct.
What I actually did on that trip, once I stopped trying to resolve the feeling: I stayed present. The guilt would come, I’d notice it, and I’d return to what was in front of me. It didn’t go away. It came and went like any other thought, like background weather. I didn’t need it to stop. I just needed to stop treating it as a verdict.
When I came back, I started where I left off. Everything was still there. The continuity survived. And I had these vivid, clear memories of the time away that I wouldn’t have had if I’d spent the whole trip fighting the guilt or giving in to it.
I thought this is “growth”. Growing large enough to hold both parts without one having to win. Growing large enough to decide not to care much about it. The productive self and the present self aren’t in competition. They’re both me and they’re both trying to build the same life. They just operate on different timescales.
I don’t think the guilt goes away. I think it’s supposed to be there. Maybe I just need to get better at carrying it?