avatarMoreno Zugaro

Summary

The article emphasizes that individuals are responsible for their reactions to life's events, regardless of fault.

Abstract

The author illustrates the distinction between fault and responsibility through a humorous anecdote about a friend's unfortunate experience with public defecation. The article underscores that while certain misfortunes are beyond our control, our responsibility lies in how we choose to respond to them. It suggests that even when not at fault, individuals must confront their responsibilities head-on, as inaction is itself a decision. The author advises making conscious choices rather than succumbing to default reactions, advocating for personal accountability as a path to empowerment and resilience in the face of adversity.

Opinions

  • The author believes that personal responsibility is unavoidable and that even when situations are not our fault, we must still manage our reactions to them.
  • It is implied that society often conflates fault with responsibility, but the author argues that they are distinct concepts that should be treated as such.
  • The author posits that choosing not to decide is still a decision, emphasizing the importance of conscious decision-making in life.
  • The article suggests that embracing responsibility can be both intimidating and empowering, offering a perspective that encourages readers to take control of their lives.
  • The author uses

It’s Not Your Fault, but It’s Your Responsibility

You can’t escape it, so you might as well face it.

Whether you like it or not, but YOU are responsible.

Someone recently emptied his bowels right in front of my friend’s front door. And when I say emptied, I mean emptied. It looked (and smelled) like anything which could possibly be found inside a human’s digestive tract had been pushed out through a tiny opening with immense pressure. It remotely resembled a Jackson Pollock Action Painting, except in all kinds of shades of brown. It wasn’t pretty.

So after my friend had a fit of rage and I one of laughter (it wasn’t my front door after all) we both went on with our lives.

Fast forward two weeks. Any reader who has seen a cheap sitcom or comedy show probably already knows what’s coming. Someone defecated right in front of his front door again. Only this time it didn’t look like an Action Painting but more like Stonehenge.

How fault and responsibility are connected

The connection between fault and responsibility is pretty easy to make. It’s how laws, courts, our judicial system and most of our society works.

You mess up, you have to make up for it.

You run a red light and hit someone (your fault), you have to compensate them in one way or the other (your responsibility).

You cheat on your significant other (your fault), you are expected to somehow make up for it (your responsibility). Good luck with this one by the way.

Now let’s look at some examples where the connection is not as obvious:

Someone loses their wallet on the street (not your fault), you happen to find it and have to decide what to do with it (your responsibility).

You lose your job because the company you work for goes bankrupt (not your fault… I hope), you have to decide what to do with your life next (your responsibility).

There is no option but to choose

I hate to break the news, but you HAVE to make a choice.

The funny thing here is that even if you decide to do nothing about it, you still have made a decision. Leaving the wallet on the ground and not touching it is your decision. Sitting at home binge-watching Netflix while the bills pile up is your decision. Heck, even if you call your mum and ask her what to do, that is still your decision.

So as you see, you cannot get around the responsibility part. Life just works this way and the sooner you understand that, the better.

Things which we are not at fault for happen all the time in our lives. Sometimes we can rightly blame others for them. But we can never blame them for how we react to these events, as this is 100% our responsibility.

You are totally responsible for your own life. And even if you are trying to avoid that and simply do what society tells you and make no decisions on your own, you still have made a decision.

Even if something happening to you is not your fault, it still is your responsibility.

Re-read this. And now let it sink in. Have you grasped the extent of what this means?

Back to the poop incident.

My friend is a nice, very empathetic dude who really has got a thing for harmonious interpersonal relationships. So naturally, if you are this kind of person and this kind of thing happens twice in a row within a timespan of two weeks (I’m still chuckling thinking about it), you get severely upset and might take it personally.

So we sat down and I told him what I have written above. That even though the incident is clearly not his fault and he has got all reason and rights to cuss out whoever did it, how he reacts to the whole thing was up to him.

He understood what I was saying. He acknowledged that this was the right way to look at it. Nevertheless, his mood stayed sour.

Do you know why? Because he still didn’t take responsibility. He was still in his default reaction, he still didn’t make a conscious choice.

So I took him down to the crime scene. We looked at the suspect. We made jokes about how the whole thing took place in detail. I brought up the Stonehenge reference. We laughed. And slowly but surely, his mood lit up.

Slowly but surely, he realized that the whole thing was nothing but a piece of fecal matter on his doorstep and everything else, all his rage and being upset was his mere reaction to it — something which he was responsible for.

Make a conscious decision

So in a nutshell, the next time something happens to you for which you are not to blame, you have two options:

You can blame someone, something or just life itself for making you feel bad. You can insist that because an event is not your fault, you are entitled to feel upset and demand that somehow, someone has to fix this for you.

Or, you can acknowledge that you have the responsibility for your own life. That you are the only one who makes your decisions. And that therefore, although you might not be at fault for what happened, you still are responsible for how you deal with it.

This does not mean that I expect you to be happy and jolly even if shit goes south (pun intended), but rather that you should make a conscious choice instead of defaulting into whatever your first intention tells you.

There is nothing wrong with being hurt and screaming at your spouse if they cheat on you.

There is nothing wrong with feeling defeated and losing motivation if you get turned down from a promising job interview.

There is nothing wrong with feeling devastated and mourning after the loss of a loved one.

And there is nothing wrong with being upset if someone poops on your doorstep two times in a row.

But acknowledge that you are the one responsible for your reaction and decide consciously what it is going to be.

This mindset shift can either be very intimidating (tons of responsibility, oh-oh) or empowering (you get to make your own choices and to shape your own life, woohoo!).

Now that you have read this, you have realized that your reaction is always up to you. Even if you don’t decide, you still do. So now, you will always have to make a decision.

It is not your fault that I have pointed this out and brought it to your attention. But it is your responsibility to decide what to do with this knowledge.

Will you carry on trying to escape your responsibility or will you embrace it?

Red pill or blue pill Neo? Which one is it gonna be?

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Life
Mindset
Responsibility
Growth
Self Improvement
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