Personal Responsibility

choquet

"Each person must accept that it's a matter of importance that his life be a successful performance, rather than a wasted opportunity."

"Each person has a special personal responsibility for identifying what counts as success in his own life."

I can reason that the second statement bears some relation to the first, but overcoming the initial hurdle of determining whether or not that success is preferential or largely causal is something which has troubled me. I might want to satisfy the notional demands of a good life, i.e anything seeping value from the intima of satisfactory living: girlfriends, sex, friendships, marriages, minutiae, high-end jobs, 401(k)s, children, etc.
But trying to unfurl the knot of my own demands seems incoherent. It's like trying to paraphrase dicta into another language. Your system of mensuration is wrong, and you're there to bear the burden of consequence as you stumble awkwardly through life, by default.

Of course, you could take the easy way out. To derive a judgement from independent causes doesn't make the judgement any less true, if we are to be rational. Sure, I can understand that maybe this internal gridlock is a feature of my unique biomechanical tracking, but the blame still falls on me if I fail to keep step. But what if the normal requirements for healthy living just aren't met here? Even if I can recognize a better life, does responsibility require that I ignore the limitations of what I can and cannot do? If I have no internal reward-mechanisms, is it defeatism to resign yourself to that state-of-affairs rather than trying to manufacture a good life from the outside?

It's worked out for the most part, insofar as I continue to exist. The only reason I haven't committed suicide is because I feel it would just be out of character for me. I can't imagine concentrating that much emotion into something, and by that token it would seem horribly ironic to commit to something requiring a state of transient nonapathy in order to pursue complete self-destruction.
Anyway, I just felt like typing something. This forum is dead so I figured it wouldn't be a problem.

malmon

Pardon me if I misunderstood your post, but in my mind, while it's entirely logical for one to measure their level of "success" purely against their own criteria, how easy it is to do that depends quite a lot on what those criteria are, and how much others' perceptions affect oneself.

For the most part, people who are well-socialised, i.e. strong family upbringing, friendship groups, etc., tend to desire things that align well with the values of the society they grew up in. Those more reclusive have a more difficult time - either their goals line up with society's standard, but are difficult to achieve, or they're misaligned entirely, further casting them out.

choquet

malmon I agree, and the tension comes from whether or not an individual selects for internal criteria which are beneficial to his form of life, or whether he just scrapes by the demands of what other people expect of him. And you can choose to accept or rebut that. That isn't completely up to him; but he shoulders that burden, and adjudging whether or not that is coherent ought well to be within his bailiwick. People can reason very loosely why something works, notwithstanding the main emphasis -- "because it works, obviously."

I think the problem then becomes balancing satisfaction, the desire to live a life on your own terms, and the demands of others who hold you personally accountable for the manner in which you're pursuant to that. If you're unhappy, society supplies you with a medley of solutions which tend to work. Get your money up, develop an athletic build, grow a Douglas Fairbanks moustache; -- do everything that you ought to do, basically. If your desire for success is unobtainable, you either forfeit that or at least, however awkwardly, aim for the goalposts; and if you punt the ball in the other direction entirely, you're to blame, and so trial and error dictate how acceptable it is to discourage or affirm individual choice.

So it's a pull-up-your-bootstraps world. Running slipshod through it doesn't do you any favors, at least according to popular consensus. And you're right, it just isn't at all easy to judge independently of how easy things come to you. If it doesn't, you're doing something wrong. That's the part I'm uncomfortable with. Whether I become a corporate mogul or a free-love hipster toking grass, people like to run about claiming their worldview to be the ostensibly correct one.