How to Take Responsibility
AKA, how to grow up and be grateful for the struggle.
Being a man means taking on responsibility and killing excuses in your brain before the weeds take root and blossom. This is a controversial statement. In our effeminate age, victimhood is currency. Power can be gained by the amount of pity you can extract from other people.
The good news is that taking responsibility in an effeminate age is like a superpower. While everyone else is moaning on social media, or blaming their father, or blaming an ex-wife, or blaming any other external pressure or force, a man who takes responsibility is a boulder dropped into a river. The water can’t help but warp and flow around him.
However, telling men that they don't have to be perpetual victims makes some men really, really angry. Here’s an example:
If this guy had asked nicely, I would have been glad to answer the question, but it was clear that no answer would have sufficed. He didn’t want answers. He wanted to vent and bloviate his feelings all over me. He wanted pity. He wanted to signal to other miserable people that he was miserable, too. So, I chose not to answer a fool according to his folly while giving him a hint of the answer.
But I’m a nice guy, so I’ll answer it here, and maybe it will be helpful to others.
What does it mean to start taking responsibility?
One Truth and Two Questions
First, remember that you are not a helpless, incompetent person. Things don’t just happen to you while you stare blank-eyed with your mouth open, using all of your brain power to remember how to breathe. You have agency.
Second, keep these two questions in mind:
“What role did I play in this situation, or how did I help form the system I am in?”
“What is one thing I can do right now to start fixing it, no matter how small?”
Focus on your own response to something, and you will be well on your way to taking responsibility.
Examples of Applying the Questions
It’s hard to get clarity when your in the midst of a situation. It’s hard to get a 1,000-foot viewpoint to see what you must do when your boots are stuck in the muck. Unless you’ve been there before or have someone you know who has been there before, AKA wisdom and experience. Also, principles are great, but we all sometimes need help applying them.
These examples won’t replace a father, a mentor, a pastor, or a coach, but they might help jar you out of some complacency.
Taking Responsibility For Your Health
Are you overweight and tired all the time? Depressed? A few small things you can do immediately.
Start walking 30 minutes per day. Preferably outside. Almost anyone can do this. If you have trouble sticking to a schedule, take responsibility for finding a walking partner you meet every day at the same time to get some accountability.
Stop eating snacks.
Make an appointment with a doctor to get blood work.
All of these things are within your power.
If you have a chronic illness or condition that will never go away, guess what? You’re still responsible for your actions. Whining about your condition isn’t going to help. Joining Facebook groups so you can engage in collective whining certainly isn’t going to help.
What can you do today, even with your limitations? Sometimes, it might just be a prayer of gratitude for what you do have. Sometimes, it might be giving other people the gift of helping you. You can offer encouraging words to others. This might be your thorn in the flesh, so figure out how it's helping you and others because it’s there for a reason. You were still given the gift of existence.
Taking Responsibility For Your Finances
Are you drowning in credit card debt? Taking responsibility means cutting way back on your consumption and starting a radical program of paying off as much debt as you can. There are programs like Financial Peace that help you do this. Get a budget app like YNAB (You Need a Budget) and set a purpose for every dollar.
Feeling trapped in your dead-end job? Feel like you don’t make enough? Go on interviews for job openings and find out what you’re really worth on the market. Make an honest assessment. If you fall short, look at the skills required and start improving those in your spare time.
Set aside 1 hour each night. Unless you’re already working two jobs, everyone has at least 1 hour each night.
Need more money now? Use that hour to make some cash on the side. Things like reselling items on eBay are within anyone’s grasp. It has never been easier to make a little extra cash online. Knock on doors and be a handyman for your neighbors. Don’t know how? Start learning how.
Or take an extra part-time job. An extra 20 hours of work per week, especially if it’s temporary, never killed anyone.
Need to switch careers? It’s never been easier to learn how to code using free resources. Come up with a simple idea and build a website or app, learning along the way. You can have something functional within a month if you spend a few hours each night. ChatGPT can even help tutor you.
And sometimes, all you have to do is humble yourself and ask someone for help. That is taking responsibility, too, as long as you are honest and use the rope to climb out of the quicksand, not continue to wallow in it.
Taking Responsibility For Your Immediate Surroundings
If you see something that needs to be done, just do it. Don’t complain about it. Don’t grumble under your breath. Don’t wish that it was taken care of. Just do it, and don’t ask for permission.
Put the shopping cart up. Clean the coffee mug in the sink. Pull the weeds. Repair the wall. If your neighbor’s yard is overgrown, go over and mow it yourself. Wipe the water off the sink. Tidy up the counter. Take out the trash. Bring in the good coffee for the office.
Do you always get stressed out trying to find things? Make a plan and take some time to organize instead of always complaining and getting angry.
Taking Responsibility For Your Children
A lot of parents complain about the behavior of their children as if they had no say in the matter at all. But your children will do what you have trained them to do. If you count to ten before doing anything, they know they can wait until you count to ten. If you refuse to discipline until you get angry, they know they can wait to listen until you get angry.
“We did the best we could.”
No, you didn’t, and taking responsibility means admitting that you were permissive and lazy or you wanted to feel self-righteous about not spanking.
What small thing can you do right now to start? Choose a single behavior you want them to stop, sit them down, and explain the consequences of the behavior. Apologize for letting it slide for so long.
When they perform the behavior, enforce the consequences. No matter what. Immediately.
Taking Responsibility For Your Relationships
Do you have no friends, or is your current friend group a bad influence? You can make new friends. Taking responsibility means admitting that your loneliness is largely self-inflicted. Some people wander the dark recesses of your apartment like Gollum, stroking a video game controller for 6+ hours per day as if it was their “precious” and then complain about about being lonely.
What are some things you can do? Start playing tennis or pickleball. Leagues are everywhere. Find a good local church and find ways to get involved. There are meetups around every type of activity. Attend one that aligns with your proclivities. When you are in public, smile more and make small talk. Once you meet some people, set up a regular cadence. Schedule weekly or monthly lunches and rotate through a few people. Or maybe breakfast or coffee in the mornings before work.
Time together like this tends to work magic. Aaron Renn has some good tips. It won’t happen overnight, but taking small steps consistently for a few months and suddenly you’ll realize you have a social life.
Taking Responsibility For Your Mistakes
If you messed up, don’t retreat and hide and don’t make excuses. Apologize to the person you wronged, tell them why, and then offer to make restitution. Accept the consequences with humility.
You’ll find that nothing earns you respect more than owning up to your mistakes.
This is the big one. If you learn to do this well, it will cover a multitude of sins, because it’s habit-forming. Even if you are only 1% at fault for the situation, taking responsibility and apologizing for your 1% is building a certain group of muscles.
“But he should have…” Stop it. Were you too trusting? Did you assume too much without communicating? Take responsibility for that.
These examples could continue forever, so I’ll stop and end on this principle.
Your Response Matters More Than Your Circumstances
There are real victims, some of horrific tragedies. But even if you didn’t throw yourself into quicksand, you can still take responsibility for how you react and for what you choose to do next. Sometimes, it’s grabbing a rope from a passerby and saying “thanks.” Don’t wallow in the quicksand until someone pats you on the head for how rough you have it, and don’t keep pointing back to your time in the quicksand to excuse your failures.
You might not have chosen a particular battle. You can still take responsibility for how well you fight the battle. In one sense, no one chooses the main battle they face. No one chose to be born. No one chose their family. No one chose their circumstances.
Yet you are still called to be faithful in what you were given.
The way some people act, they expect the entire world to align around them and be perfect before they can be troubled to make a move.
“But the divorce laws…”
“But my boss is just…”
“If only I had a little more money…”
“If the Federal tax rate wasn’t so high…”
“But there are so many stupid people on the internet…”
“But the publishing industry will never buy a manuscript from a white guy…”
“But my knee hurts…”
“If only my wife wasn’t so lazy…”
The world is never going to be perfect. You have to take responsibility for your piece of it anyway. It might be hard. It might be painful. You weren’t promised an easy, pain-free life.
What’s Next?
By taking on more responsibility, you’ve built up stronger muscles and bigger shoulders. Time to lift more. For example, if you have no problems making friends and have that part of your life locked down, take responsibility for someone else. Find one of the lonely guys in your church who needs a friend and add him to your rotation of lunches.
The reward for taking responsibility is leveling up, and as a consequence, things should get more challenging. But now you’re better prepared for it. Rinse and repeat until you die, and hopefully your cause of death will be from living, and not complaining about not living.
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An important third question after what role did I play? and how can I fix it? Is: What can I do to prevent or lessen the chances of this happening again?
It may not be my fault, and I may not be able to fix it. But if those two things are the case, then I would be a fool to not do my utmost to ensure it never happens again.
This is much-needed advice for the victim-prone young men of today's world, but do you have any corresponding advice for navigating what amount of responsibility is "responsible" for a man to bear?
For example, it may be very honorable to take that second job, burn the midnight oil acquiring new skills, socialize more, or launch that side business. But this often comes at the expense of some other form of unity, especially for your wife and kids.
Surely our Crosses should be just a bit too heavy for our backs, but not so much that we can't make the journey.