The word «responsibility» in our language is largely devalued, has lost its original meaning, it exudes something official and soulless. “Responsible workers” in Soviet times were people who made decisions that affect the lives of many, but who did not bear any responsibility for them.
From the words “you will answer for this”, goosebumps run down the back, since responsibility comes when something terrible (at least unpleasant) has happened, and there is criminal, civil, at best administrative. Yes, but also moral and material.
However, many prominent philosophers and psychologists emphasized that responsibility is directed not to the past, but to the future and is inseparable from freedom. To answer means to understand what consequences I generate by my actions (or inaction), to do what leads to the desired consequences, to avoid what leads to undesirable ones.
Know what you want, understand the connection of your actions with their consequences and be able to choose
Taking responsibility for my actions means acknowledging that I am myself! — I do them. Denying responsibility means declaring them some kind of involuntary reaction (“I was forced to…”). In other words, I can only be responsible for what I can really influence, the cause of which I can be. Therefore, responsibility cannot be given, handed over — it can only be assumed. A responsible person is not afraid of failure and is ready to learn from it, because he does not consider himself the only cause of events and knows that there is no complete guarantee in this world.
To answer means to know what you want, to understand the connection of your actions with the consequences, and to have the courage to choose. Understanding, decision, and courage require effort, and since other forces influence the outcome of events, the bet made does not always lead to a win. Hence the desire to relax, avoid responsibility and let everything go at random is understandable.
Having convinced ourselves that no matter what we do, the result does not depend on it, we devote a huge part of our life (and sometimes all of it) to infantile games that cannot have any life consequences, except for those that we ourselves arbitrarily attribute to them. Childhood, of course, is the most pleasant time, but we become full-fledged people only when we grow up. Our childhood, it seems, has dragged on, and it’s time, as Joseph Brodsky said, “to stop being just talkative consequences in the great causal chain of phenomena and try to take on the role of causes.”