There are many negative emotions: envy, anger, fear, worry, sadness, to name a few. Positive emotions don’t carry as much nuance. When you’re asked how you’re doing, assuming you’re doing good, you’ll probably reply you’re simply ‘doing good’. Positive emotions like happiness, fulfilment or excitement appear to be more strongly correlated with one another – for this reason, they’re often lumped together under the generic term ‘happiness’¹.

Among negative experiences, worry is the most prevalent. In a 2024 Gallup study where adults were asked which feelings they’d experienced ‘a lot’ the previous day, 39% and 37% reported feelings of worry and stress, respectively. Next followed physical pain (32%), sadness (26%) and anger (22%)².

While moderate amounts of worry might be productive, some unpleasant feelings seem wholly negative. And the worst of unpleasant feelings is shame.

Shame #

Shame is unlike worry, stress, pain, sadness or anger; it’s sometimes defined as an uncomfortable feeling of guilt, and is often related to a loss of respect. For me, the most common source of shame is mistakes. Most such mistakes are inconsequential – even the worst of typos won’t kill – but they impinge on my honour. I feel particularly ashamed when reflecting on social blunders, times when I failed to respect norms or hierarchies.

Coping with shame #

Part of why shame is so insidious is that you can’t do much about it: when you’re ashamed, part of you is playing the role of the admonishing teacher. You cannot make yourself shameless, as it were, because that would involve contradicting yourself. Sometimes you can get rid of shame by redoing things the right way, though this is impossible for many social situations. So, you err, you’re ashamed, you learn, and you’re still ashamed.

This said, sometimes you shouldn’t learn: you shouldn’t necessarily let shame influence your behaviour. There are many wicked social norms and beauty ideals causing shame, and these must be ignored. For example, I sometimes feel ashamed for asking ’too many’ questions during lectures, even when they’re well motivated: women shouldn’t take up too much space, and especially not in the context of mathematics. Another example: I sometimes have to remind myself I’m free to not shave my legs. A complicating aspect of shame, then, is that you can be ashamed although you’re right and they wrong.

The intensity of shame #

The worst thing about shame, however, is its intensity. In my experience, no other negative emotion can be as violent. Even moderate amounts of shame can be unbearable, making you want to vanish from the surface of the earth for a while. The force of emotion can being debilitating, preventing you from learning whatever lessons are to be learned.

And whereas intense anger or sadness can be pleasurable, a conundrum first discussed in Poetics, shame just feels terrible. There are no tragedies, sad movies or sub-genres of emo music meant to elicit shame – shame doesn’t lead to catharsis; shame isn’t pure emotion. Instead, shame responses are complicated and highly culturally dependent.

Societies of shame #

Shame is a powerful driver of human behaviour, and it has been exploited to enforce social institutions since forever. For instance, shame compels people to be faithful to their spouses and respect social hierarchies, and most successful world religions have incorporated an element of shame to ensure their growth. Societies are largely built on shame, especially those where there’s a strong culture of honour.

So shame serves an important role, but only on a social level. Most other negative emotions can benefit the individual; shame only benefits the individual insofar as it increases their social status.

Humans are sometimes willing to inspire anger, fear, envy – any negative emotion really, except for shame. As noted by Hjalmar Söderberg in Doctor Glas, we’re desperate for human contact:

One wants to be loved; failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. One wants to instill some sort of feeling in people. The soul shudders at the void and wants contact at any price.

And shame is the opposite of human contact.