Good Intentions & Guilt Trips

I have a travel weakness. Not Paris. Not Bali. Not Route 66 in a convertible.

No—my frequent journey is the Guilt Trip.

I don’t know who runs the travel agency for guilt trips, but they must have one hell of a marketing team. I keep booking passage, even though I swear I’m never going back.

They don’t even need Instagram ads; it’s cultural marketing, baked right into the background noise of our lives.

You hear it everywhere:

• “Be productive.”

• “Hustle harder.”

• “You have the same 24 hours as Beyoncé.”

Yeah, but Beyoncé also has a personal chef, a stylist, and probably a stage manager for her grocery runs.

Context matters.

I want to be the kind of person who:

• Publishes books.

• Works out four times a week.

• Cooks healthy meals instead of raiding the snack aisle.

• Reads thick, brainy books without falling down a Wikipedia hole.

• Shows up at fun events with friends and somehow also gets enough sleep.

Do you see it? The guilt for not being all of that? For not doing all of that?

Every “addition” I sign up for takes time away from prior commitments and self-promises. And the shame of incompletions builds a case against trusting myself.

After enough failures, it feels safer not to try at all.

Brené Brown nails it: “Shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change.”

Because I’m a Platinum Member on the Guilt Trip Express, I sometimes shy away from new opportunities. Not because they aren’t good, but because I don’t want more pain and regret stamped in my passport.

Yet what if the very thing I skip—the walk, the workshop, the conversation—was the one “less” I actually needed?

Marcus Aurelius had this figured out: “If you seek tranquility, do less.” Or (more accurately) do what’s essential… because most of what we say and do is not essential.

Here’s where my mentoring philosophy kicks in. Meliorism—the belief that things can get better through effort and choice—doesn’t demand hustle. It asks for alignment.

Instead of stacking one more plate on the buffet, what if we practiced subtraction?

Carl Jung once said: “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.”

Maybe the real breakthrough comes not from more guilt trips, but from finding the playful, necessary “less” that matters.

I still catch myself buying tickets to guilt trips with good intentions.

But I’ve also learned that “less” can be the silence between notes—the rhythm that makes the melody possible.

I hope you find your own meaningful “less,” one you can trust, one that gives your life a beat you can dance to.

Because the best trips aren’t the guilt trips. They’re the ones that carry you somewhere you actually want to be.

Sources:
: Brown, B. (2010). The Gifts of Imperfection. Hazelden Publishing.
: Aurelius, M. (2002). Meditations (Gregory Hays, Trans.). Modern Library.
: Jung, C. G. (1964). Man and His Symbols. Anchor Press.