I’ve always been attracted to schools of thought that say you should consider everything in your control and take responsibility for everything around you because, in the end, you can only truly control yourself. So if you want different results, you need to change yourself.
And it’s an enticing message and also seems totally reasonable.
I do want to note that I think “personal responsibility” as a personal strategy can be helpful (to the extent I’m going to outline), but “personal responsibility” as public policy is disastrous at best and deeply malicious at worst. I think it’s basically just used to justify the status quo, blame the less fortunate for their problems, and codify a tiered society while freeing the ruling class from any semblance of guilt (or – ironically – responsibility).
With that out of the way, I want to highlight the primary ways in which using “personal responsibility” as a personal strategy is limited or can be actively harmful:
- Many things are completely out of your control and if you believe otherwise you will waste your time
- You’ll worry about the outcome of everything around you, feeling that those outcomes are a reflection of your own efforts and abilities
- You’ll blame yourself and feel a tremendous sense of guilt every time something goes wrong
- You might feel inadequate with your abilities or accomplishments because you are downplaying or outright denying the importance of external advantages others might have had (wealthy parents, connections, etc.)
This is honestly something I never really considered before today. While I knew there were potential pitfalls to blindly believing in “personal responsibility,” I guess I never really considered how such an ideology was hurting me.
And now I have, and I’m realizing that it’s been harmful in quite a few ways.
I think it has made me a lot more anxious. Historically I’ve always considered myself an easy-going, go-with-the-flow type of person, but I’ve felt my anxiety creeping up over the years and I think this is partly to blame.
I feel responsible for everything bad that happens around me. I always think of things I should have done to prevent it, and I treat the possibility of future bad things like a puzzle to be solved. If I just work hard enough or do things perfectly, I can avoid it.
Some of the happiest people I know are the types to not take responsibility for much of anything. They see most problems as someone else’s fault, and so aren’t bothered by them.
And that’s probably what is the most harmful to me: it’s the feeling that these bad things happen because of my own inadequacies. It’s my fault they happened, and I should have been better.
Since obviously it’s impossible to prevent bad things from happening, and many of these things are completely out of your control, this leads to a rather pointless and constant barrage against your self-esteem.
And if our only goal was productivity, you could make the case that with a crippled self-esteem, you’re going to be way less capable and get much less done in the end, defeating the purpose of “personal responsibility”.
Productivity is, of course, not our only goal. And so the damage to self-esteem matters far more than just how it affects productivity.
I think that this mindset has also hurt me in that it’s hard for me to let go of things. For every failed project, relationship, goal, or performance, I can’t help but analyze what I did wrong and ultimately blame myself.
Which: of course! That’s the whole idea.
But you can’t spend all your time thinking about your failures. In reality, they may not even be your failures. Sometimes things just happen. Some things weren’t meant to be.
While looking at everything like it’s your fault may provide useful insight so you can improve in the future, it also might not.
And more importantly: it may severely cripple your own self-image to the point where you no longer see yourself as talented or capable at all. And besides making you unhappy, it may also ruin your future chances at success.
I can’t help but still keep thinking this way, but I think it’s important to seek balance. I need to learn when to dig for insight in failures, and when to simply accept them and move on. Some failures have no lessons.
I’ve spoken before about how I think we need to be careful about the lessons we learn from our failures, but I’m just now starting to realize that one of the reasons I prefer to learn lessons from successes is because it’s just a lot better for your self-esteem. And if we want to approach things from a pragmatic perspective, we need to also consider these things because they affect future performance, too.
I’m not saying that focusing on “personal responsibility” doesn’t have benefits. What I’m saying is that it absolutely has limits. It doesn’t apply to every situation.
If, in a given situation, it’s a useful paradigm: use it! But if it doesn’t serve you then you shouldn’t.