Human weakness has a funny way of making you feel like you’re the only person who hasn’t figured life out.
You can understand other people’s flaws with remarkable patience while treating your own as a personal failure. Apparently, everybody else gets to be human except you.
I’ve always found that arrangement utterly ridiculous.
We’ve developed an unhealthy relationship with the idea of being a good, mature, emotionally intelligent person. We want to be confident without needing reassurance, generous without feeling jealous, independent without needing anybody, and disciplined without ever having to drag ourselves through an unpleasant task. We even expect ourselves to handle rejection with the emotional composure of someone who has never wanted anything badly.
That’s a hell of a standard.
There are things about being human that you should be able to admit without feeling ashamed. Here are eleven of them.
Wanting People to Like You
There’s something deeply embarrassing about admitting how much other people’s opinions can affect you. We would rather describe ourselves as independent thinkers who don’t care what anybody thinks.
That sounds considerably better than admitting that we sometimes rehearse conversations in our heads because we want someone to think well of us.
I find the obsession with appearing unaffected particularly dishonest.
Humans care about acceptance. We want people to enjoy our company. We want our presence to make a difference to somebody.
Psychologists Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary explored this in their influential 1995 paper on the need to belong.
They argued that forming and maintaining stable relationships serves a fundamental human motivation.
You can work on your self-esteem without pretending that other people’s approval means nothing to you. Wanting to be liked doesn’t make you weak or insecure. It makes you human.
Wanting to be liked is not a flaw to manage. It’s the whole point of being social.
The people who brag about not caring what anyone thinks are lying, or lonely, or both. Stop pretending independence means not needing anyone. It doesn’t. It means choosing who you need.
Feeling Envious of Other People’s Success
Envy has a terrible reputation because people tend to associate it with wishing somebody else would fail. However, envy also reveals something uncomfortable about your own desires.
Sometimes another person’s success bothers you because it exposes how badly you want something you haven’t achieved. Their progress puts your own frustrations directly in front of you. You can congratulate them and still feel an unpleasant little sting.
Research by Niels van de Ven, Marcel Zeelenberg, and Rik Pieters distinguishes between benign and malicious envy. Their 2009 paper in Emotion showed that benign envy can motivate people to improve their own position, while malicious envy motivates them to bring the other person down.
Envy is ambition you haven’t admitted to yourself.
That’s why it hurts. It’s not about them. It’s about you seeing what you actually want and realizing you haven’t gone after it.
You don’t have to pretend to be happy for everyone. Pretending is what makes envy rot into bitterness. Admit you want it. That’s the only part that ever turns envy into ambition. The rest is performance.
Procrastinating Even When You Know Better
Procrastination can make you feel like an irresponsible adult who somehow escaped the consequences of growing up.
You know what needs doing. You understand what happens when you delay. You can even explain the consequences in considerable detail while continuing to avoid the task.
There’s a frustrating kind of self-awareness involved in procrastination. You recognise your own behavior and still struggle to stop repeating it.
Psychologists Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl offered an interesting explanation in
. They argued that procrastination often serves an immediate emotional purpose.
People postpone tasks because avoiding an unpleasant task temporarily improves how they feel.
We like imagining that self-awareness automatically gives us control over our behavior. It doesn’t. Knowing what you should do and finding it difficult to do it can coexist in the same person.
You don’t have to feel ashamed because your discipline occasionally falls short of your intentions.
Getting Angry When People Disrespect You
We’re very fond of praising emotional composure. The person who never raises their voice, never loses their temper, and never shows irritation often gets treated as the most mature person in the room.
I’m suspicious of that standard.
Anger can be a genuinely reasonable response to being mistreated. There’s nothing wrong to feel angry because someone crossed a boundary, dismissed your contribution, or treated your needs as irrelevant.
Sometimes anger comes from recognising that somebody has treated you unfairly.
But anger isn’t a problem to manage. It’s information. If someone treats you like you don’t matter, feeling angry isn’t childish — not feeling angry is the problem.
It’s not maturity, and there’s nothing to be proud of when you keep swallowing disrespect.
You don’t have to enjoy being disrespected to prove that you’re emotionally mature. You’re allowed to feel angry when somebody treats you badly.
Sometimes You Want to Be Right More Than You Want the Truth
This one stings because most of us enjoy thinking of ourselves as reasonable people.
We like facts when they support our position. We enjoy intelligent discussions when we have the better argument. We become considerably less enthusiastic when information threatens an opinion we’ve defended for years.
I know this because I did it for a week over a voice note. It was 47 seconds long. He’d sent it after I’d made a joke about his job in front of everyone at his birthday. The joke had landed as me diminishing him, because that’s what it was.
He didn’t shout. He just said, very calmly: “I don’t think you meant to be cruel, but it felt cruel. I’d like you to think about that.”
I listened to it 7 times. Not because I didn’t understand it. Because I understood it perfectly on the first listen, and I didn’t want to. I didn’t reply. Instead, I opened my Notes app and started a draft I titled “don’t send yet.”
Over the next three days, that draft became 11 different versions. Version 3 started with “You’re overreacting a bit, but…” Version 7 started with “If you were offended…” Version 9 was just a list of all the times he’d made a joke at my expense, which I’d been quietly cataloguing for years.
I knew every version was me trying to be right, not trying to be honest. It was pride with a Notes app and an impressive commitment to making things worse.
The only honest version was Version 11, and it was only four lines: “You’re right. I wanted to look funny in front of everyone, and I used you to do it. I’m sorry. I’ve been embarrassed about it since.”
I didn’t send Version 11 for another four days. I kept telling myself I was “waiting for the right moment” when really I was waiting for the shame to go away on its own. It didn’t.
What finally made me send it wasn’t courage. I was in a barbing shop waiting for my turn, scrolling through my phone to kill time, and I just sent it before I could talk myself out of it again.
A few minutes later, I saw his reply: “Thank you for saying that properly.”
We’re fine now. But I still think about that week more than I think about the joke itself. The joke took five seconds. The pride took a week.
I’m not ashamed that I felt proud. I’m responsible for what that pride made me do for that whole week.
The trouble starts when protecting your self-image becomes more important than correcting your mistakes. You can spend years defending an opinion simply because abandoning it would force you to reconsider how you see yourself.
Struggling With Loneliness
Loneliness can make you feel socially inadequate. We attach a surprising amount of shame to the inability to feel connected to other people, especially when we assume everybody else has found their place.
I used to find the expectation of complete independence rather strange. Why should needing human connection count against your character?
The independence myth is a lie.
We told a whole generation that needing people is weakness, and then acted surprised when they ended up lonely and calling it “self-sufficiency.”
You’re not independent if you’re lonely. You’re just alone and calling it a personality.
Some people spend years lying to themselves that they don’t need anybody because admitting otherwise feels like surrendering their independence.
That’s an exhausting way to live.
Wanting companionship is a human need, not an embarrassing admission of personal inadequacy.
Holding On to Resentment
People love telling others to let things go.
Apparently, you’re supposed to process every disappointment, forgive every offence, and move through life without carrying any unpleasant feelings about the people who hurt you.
I find that particular expectation rather convenient for people who want forgiveness without accountability.
Resentment can linger because something happened that you never properly resolved. Perhaps someone treated you unfairly, took advantage of your generosity, or didn’t take full responsibility for their behavior.
You can acknowledge that the experience belongs in the past and still feel angry when you remember it.
Sometimes you want to stop resenting somebody, but the feeling hasn’t caught up with your intentions. That’s being human.
We seem to expect forgiveness to happen on command. We treat lingering resentment as a sign of bitterness or emotional immaturity, as though every unpleasant feeling should disappear once we’ve decided that it should.
You can dislike what someone did to you years ago. You can struggle to forgive someone whose behavior changed how you see them. You can carry an uncomfortable feeling without that feeling becoming your entire personality.
Resentment isn’t bitterness. It’s memory. People who tell you to “let it go” usually want you to let them go — off the hook, without accountability.
Forgiveness without accountability isn’t healing. It’s PR for the person who hurt you.
Regretting Your Past Decisions
Regret has a particularly nasty way of making you question your intelligence.
You look back with information you didn’t possess at the time and wonder how you could have made such a decision. You judge your former self using knowledge that only became available afterwards.
I’ve looked back at decisions I made years ago and wondered what the hell I was thinking. The older I got, the easier it became to see what I should have done.
What took longer was remembering that I didn’t have the same information, experience, or perspective when I made those decisions.
Hindsight can make an old decision look much more foolish than it actually was. You forget what you knew, what you feared, what you wanted, and what options seemed available.
I don’t regret the joke as much as I regret that week. You can regret a decision without treating your former self with contempt.
Making a mistake doesn’t mean you were stupid. Sometimes you simply made a decision that turned out badly.
There’s no need to spend the rest of your life embarrassed by the fact that you couldn’t predict everything.
Having Thoughts and Feelings You Don’t Like
This is one of the more uncomfortable parts of being human.
You can’t control every thought that enters your mind.
You can have an unkind thought about someone you love, feel jealous of a friend, or experience an emotion that clashes with your personal values.
Then comes the second problem: you start judging yourself for having the feeling in the first place.
We’ve been sold the idea that good people have clean minds. That’s a lie. Good people have dirty minds and clean hands.
The difference was never what you think. It’s what you do.
Psychologist Daniel Wegner and his colleagues demonstrated something interesting in
on thought suppression.
Participants instructed to avoid thinking about a white bear later showed increased thoughts about it when the restriction ended.
Trying to force an unwanted thought out of your mind can make it more persistent. A thought is not a confession. It’s just noise your brain makes.
The people who are most terrified of their own thoughts are usually the ones trying hardest not to act on them. The ones you should actually worry about are the ones who never have an ugly thought at all — because they’ve stopped noticing.
Fear of Uncertainty
We love certainty because it gives us somewhere to stand.
We want to know whether our decisions will work, whether people will stay, whether our efforts will pay off, and whether we’re making the right choices. Uncertainty can make even ordinary decisions feel unnecessarily exhausting.
I don’t buy the idea that mature people somehow outgrow this discomfort. Sometimes we would rather believe something with confidence than sit with a question we can’t answer.
We don’t want truth. We want certainty, even if it’s false. We’d rather believe a confident lie than sit with an honest “I don’t know.” That’s not a cute human quirk. That’s why people stay in bad jobs, bad relationships, bad beliefs — because a bad certainty feels safer than a good question.
There’s nothing embarrassing about wanting reassurance when the future feels uncertain.
Humans have always wanted to know what lies ahead.
Needing Help
There’s a kind of pride attached to handling everything yourself. We admire people who appear capable, self-sufficient, and emotionally strong.
We often treat depending on others as an embarrassing weakness that grown adults should eventually eliminate.
Once again, I disagree with that expectation.
Needing help is not a failure of independence. Independence was never doing everything alone. That was just isolation in disguise.
Pride doesn’t make asking for help feel like incompetence. It makes not asking feel like strength. That’s the con.
You exhaust yourself trying to prove you don’t need anyone, and then you call the exhaustion “being an adult.”
You don’t lose your adulthood because somebody helps you carry a burden. You lose it when you would rather collapse than admit you can’t carry it alone.
That attitude can become especially destructive when you start measuring your worth by how little you need from anybody.
Human relationships involve giving and receiving. You can’t insist on being useful to everyone while treating your own needs as an inconvenience.
Final Thought
I find it exhausting how much effort people spend trying to become versions of themselves who never experience ordinary human discomfort.
We want to eliminate all human weaknesses. We treat them as embarrassing admissions that we’ve not become the people we were supposed to be.
But who decided that being a decent human being required such an impressive absence of human weakness?
You can be a good person and still have an ego. You can love people and sometimes envy them. You can understand your mistakes and still regret them. You can be independent and still need somebody to help you.
You don’t have to be proud of every part of yourself to stop being ashamed of being human.