The day I got my promotion, my friend’s father died.

I found out about both on the same afternoon. First the email from HR, then the phone call from my friend. I sat with my phone in one hand and the email open on my laptop, feeling two things that refused to exist together. Joy and sorrow. Celebration and grief. I wanted to be happy. I felt I had no right.

I went to the funeral the next day. I said the right things. I held my friend’s hand. But underneath my appropriate sadness, a small voice kept saying: you got the promotion. You got what you wanted. And this voice felt like betrayal. How could I feel joy when someone was lowering a father into the ground?

This guilt has followed me my whole life. I do not know if it is virtue or sickness.

When I was a child, my mother would remind me of starving children whenever I complained about food. “Finish your rice,” she would say. “Children in Africa have nothing.” I finished my rice, but I also learned something else: my comfort was connected to others’ suffering. If they had nothing, how dare I have something? If they were hungry, how dare I be full?

This equation lodged itself deep in my brain. Other people’s pain became a tax on my pleasure. I could not simply enjoy good fortune. I had to first account for all the misfortune in the world, and somehow my happiness had to answer for it.

My neighbor’s child was diagnosed with cancer last year. The same week, my daughter won a scholarship. I should have been celebrating. Instead, I felt a strange shame. How could my child thrive when theirs was dying? What cosmic injustice allowed my family health while theirs suffered? I found myself unable to fully feel my joy. It seemed obscene.

I have thought about this guilt for many years. I have tried to understand where it comes from.

Part of it is religious, I think. The faiths I grew up with treated earthly happiness with suspicion. Joy was distraction from the eternal. Pleasure was temptation. The truly holy were supposed to suffer, to sacrifice, to deny themselves. Happiness was for the shallow. Depth required pain.

Part of it is cultural. We are taught that privilege brings responsibility. If you have more, you owe more. This is not wrong—I believe in responsibility. But somewhere along the way, responsibility became guilt. Having became owing. Being fortunate became being indebted.

Part of it might be evolutionary. Our ancestors survived in tribes. If one person feasted while others starved, the tribe would fracture. Perhaps we developed an instinct to suppress individual happiness for collective solidarity. Perhaps guilt is the mechanism that kept our ancestors from being selfish.

But here is what I have come to understand, slowly, over many years: my unhappiness helps no one.

When I feel guilty about my promotion, my friend’s father does not come back to life. When I suppress my joy at my daughter’s scholarship, my neighbor’s child does not heal. My self-denial changes nothing in the world. It only diminishes me.

This is the paradox I could not see for so long. I thought my guilt was compassion. I thought my inability to enjoy good fortune was evidence of my moral sensitivity. But guilt is not compassion. Guilt is self-focused. It is about managing my own feelings, not helping others. While I am busy feeling bad about feeling good, I am not actually doing anything useful for anyone.

My friend who lost his father did not need my guilt. He needed my presence. He needed me to show up, to listen, to help with practical things. He needed me to be strong enough to support him. If I had collapsed into guilt, if I had been unable to function because of my own moral anguish, I would have been useless to him.

This is what I am learning: joy is not a finite resource.

I used to think of happiness like money—if I had some, someone else had less. But happiness does not work this way. My joy does not steal from others. My contentment does not create their suffering. These things are not connected by any real mechanism. They are connected only in my guilty imagination.

In fact, the opposite might be true. When I am happy, I have more to give. When I am thriving, I can help others thrive. When I allow myself to feel joy, I become proof that joy is possible. I become a template, not a thief.

I think of my daughter. If I model guilt every time something good happens, what am I teaching her? That she should never enjoy success? That every blessing must be accompanied by shame? That she should spend her life apologizing for her good fortune? This is not wisdom. This is a prison I would be building for her.

I want her to be happy. I want her to fully embrace her joys without looking over her shoulder at the world’s sorrows. I want her to know that her thriving does not cause others’ suffering, and that her guilt does not ease it.

This does not mean I want her to be callous. Compassion matters. Helping others matters. But compassion is action, not guilt. Compassion is showing up, giving time, offering resources. Guilt is just feeling bad. One changes the world. The other only changes your mood.

I went to see my neighbor last week. The one whose child has cancer. I did not go with guilt. I went with food, with offers to help, with willingness to listen. I went as a person who has been blessed and wants to share that blessing, not as a person apologizing for not being cursed.

It felt different. It felt cleaner. I was useful instead of merely sorry.

The promotion I got—I have decided to enjoy it. Not with arrogance, not with ignorance of others’ struggles, but with genuine gratitude. I worked hard for it. It is mine. My joy does not dishonor my friend’s grief. These are separate things happening to separate people in a world large enough to contain both.

My daughter’s scholarship—I celebrated it. Fully. Without the shadow of the neighbor’s child darkening every moment. I can hold both realities: that a child is sick, and that my child has succeeded. These truths do not cancel each other. They simply coexist, as all of life’s contradictions coexist.

I am not cured of guilt. It still visits me. But I am learning to question it now. When guilt arrives, I ask: does my suffering help anyone? Will my self-denial change anything? Is this compassion, or is it just performance?

Usually the answer is clear. My guilt serves no one. My joy, shared and expressed and lived fully, might actually serve many.

So I am practicing something new. I am practicing happiness without apology. I am practicing gratitude without guilt. I am practicing the radical idea that my thriving is not a crime against those who struggle, but perhaps a small light in a dark world.

A light helps no one if it dims itself in shame.

A light helps by shining.

So I am trying, finally, to shine.