#105. Responsibility

How responsible are we in today’s world? Are we making the most of the resources we have available, or are we squandering the great gifts that have been provided to us? Today, we will talk about these very questions in great depth.

As we delve deeper into this discussion, we will examine various examples of both responsible and irresponsible behaviours, ultimately seeking to inspire a more conscientious approach to living the good life.

The greatest day in your life and mine is when we take total responsibility for our attitudes. That’s the day we truly grow up.

– John C. Maxwell

Celebration

Before I jump into the article, I want to celebrate a small win. Therefore, I request you to please bear with me while I jump high enough to hit my head on the roof.

Last year, I finally decided to commit to writing one article per week on Facets of Life. When I began, I used to think this is another one of those bursts of motivation, which will fade with the passage of time. Fast forward to today, I have celebrated a few achievements already, like hitting 4000 viewers, 500 likes and 100 articles.

This achievement, however, is a bit more special to me.

Last week, I completed one year of writing one article per week on this website. That is 52 of the 105 articles that I have written here. This is an input metric, not an output metric, and one that others don’t necessarily celebrate. But I will, because doing this for one year regularly has given me the belief that I could do this forever, and it has become a cornerstone habit for me. I truly enjoy the time I spend writing these articles, and get clarity on the subjects I pick to write on.

For everyone who has been on this ride with me, I want to take a second to thank you. I hope you get some value out of what I have been writing, and I vow to continue doing this and provide my insights on how to get to the Good Life.

The Article

Okay, back to regularly scheduled programming.

Today, we are going to talk about responsibility.

The term “responsibility” has mixed connotations, depending on who you are asking. Rarely ever do we enjoy taking on more responsibility, thinking it complicates our lives. It forces us to allocate our time to something we might not necessarily want to. We hear & make all sorts of arguments about how there is more than enough on our plates, and taking on more would just mean compromising on quality.

And logically, it makes sense too. If we are not allocating enough time and attention to things we have at hand, it is bound to impact our quality of work. And we see that most of us are busier than ever. I have heard the statement “I don’t have the time” 55 times in the past couple of weeks alone. I might have said it more than a couple of times too. But what exactly are we busy with?

No one knows the answer, and frankly, no one cares either. We have all accepted that we have more than enough things to do, while we still make time for a lot of frivolous activities like scrolling through our favourite social media applications.

These patterns are not only going to continue despite people rambling about their ill effects, we also continue to indulge ourselves in them. No need to go very far to find an example, I am guilty of this myself. For the past few months, my days start with idle scrolling on YouTube shorts, watching pointless videos before I even leave the bed.

Do I feel bad about it? Yes.

Am I doing anything about it? I am trying.

Any of this sound familiar?

This is the context in which I want to put the term “Responsibility” today.

More often than not, we consider responsibility as this external force that is thrusted upon us by someone. However, what we are failing to realise these days is that responsibility is an intrinsic trait. And there is a strong argument to be made that despite us having all the tools and resources in the world, we are less than responsible with a couple of them.

The first one, is time. We see a huge surge in the time we are spending on screens doing absolutely nothing, and yet coming out of our doomscrolling sessions as drained as we would after a strenuous workout. Which conveniently brings me to the second one, which is energy. Anyone who has gone through a modern day talk on time management would know about energy allocation.

For anyone unfamiliar with the concept, it states that we should optimise not just for time, but for the energy levels we have at different times of the day. That being said, we spend most of our energy doing things that add little to no value to our lives. What value are the random trivia facts shared by a vertically oriented videos? Where would we be using this information?

I’ll tell you, nowhere. Except for spending our time and energy in them, there is no outcome. They are like empty calories, which do nothing for our bodies but everything for our brains centre which seeks instant gratification.

The moment we take responsibility, all these external forces fade, and even if something comes to us externally, we make much better decisions about how to (or how not to) tackle them.

Decisions become much more binary, things become way simpler when we realise that if things need to be done, we have to do them ourselves.

If we realise that there is no one else getting impacted by our actions, but ourselves, we are far more likely to take productive actions. 

If you stuck around this far, thank you for your time. If you enjoyed this, share this with one friend of yours whom you think will benefit from reading this. Thanks for reading, and I will see you in the next one. 🙂