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Comment by ecjhdnc2025 | Hacker News Reader

ecjhdnc2025

You can't change the reasons for which you need a new person, and you've materially benefited from the person working for low pay. But it's not guilt, it's your morality and ethics identifying a gain you made that you feel you shouldn't be comfortable with.

One suggestion, perhaps the most obvious: identify the likely pay/compensation of the person who will replace them, and then pay them the difference (or as much of it as you can) in severance over and above what you're required to offer.

Second suggestion: help find this person a new job at the kind of pay they should actually have been earning for the quality of work they were doing.

But don't feel guilt: it's more like a moral obligation. It's a good thing, not a negative emotion. It means you're thinking like a complete person in a world where it is common to pretend that isn't necessary.

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>it's your morality and ethics identifying a gain you made that you feel you shouldn't be comfortable with.

What's your definition of guilt then? Just curious. Thanks.

My internal definition of guilt is screwed up because I have OCD. This is why I am so keen on defining guilt carefully.

What I am describing above is just discomfort. Unless the parent poster deliberately sought to underpay the person, they should have no guilt merely from that scenario. Discomfort is real enough.

Guilt might attach if they do not or choose not to act on that discomfort, or if the person is materially disadvantaged by not doing the ongoing work, or if a promise of better pay/longer employment was attached to asking for that work to be done at a low pay.

Thank you.

> But don't feel guilt: it's more like a moral obligation. It's a good thing, not a negative emotion. It means you're thinking like a complete person in a world where it is common to pretend that isn't necessary.

If you have a moral obligation you can’t fulfill because of the rules of the human system you operate in, how exactly do you propose avoiding a negative emotion?

Not sure I should answer a post with a "how exactly" in it, to be honest, because it's rude. But:

I don't, but that negative emotion shouldn't necessarily be guilt.

First off, we don't know the obligation can't be fulfilled in this case. No reason to feel guilty if it can be. Things change.

Second, if there is genuinely nothing you can do to fulfil a moral obligation because of systemic issues, there is no value in guilt; it's literally not your fault. There might be negative emotions but it's better to consider them sadness or helplessness, and push away guilt.

Negative emotions happen. But taking on guilt for things you did not do and cannot fix for reasons outside your control is significantly emotionally damaging.

Apologies for the rude tone. I was mis-reading your comment as saying it's possible to fully avoid negative emotions around this type of situation, but going back I see that wasn't what you said.

Yes, I agree with everything you've written here.

The only nuance I'd add is that feeling guilt (or sadness, or helplessness) is not necessarily bad—emotions are valuable signals that can be mined for insight. I think the problem comes when we start to dwell on negative emotions and then internalize them as somehow representative of the state of the universe. Don't try to suppress or change the emotion, feel it, acknowledge it, then take a breath and decide on a course of action that you think will lead to the best outcome.

Actually it is me who should apologise; I'm in an awful mood today and on other days would not have been so pompous, I hope :-)

And yes -- I think to some extent my determination to push myself not to accept guilt for things that aren't my fault comes from realising that guilt for imagined misdeeds is the most potent fuel for OCD, which has wrecked the pattern of my life; it is a thief of joy.

When I explained one of my OCD obsessions/compulsions to a friend, they said "I can understand why that affected you but you understand it is literally absurd to have guilt from that?", and it was one of the most empowering things I've ever heard.

Guilt is a burden that good people willingly shoulder and bad people willingly shirk (if they are capable of it at all).

Internalising that there are more productive negative emotions to feel than unearned, secondhand guilt is a life's work for me.

> don't feel guilt: it's more like a moral obligation

Let's not quibble. English is too imprecise for this kind of argument.

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