Been thinking about my very strong sense of responsibility today.

I’ve always been a little proud of it, because it matches my morality. Basically, I think that each person is morally responsible for all the foreseeable consequences of their actions.

That sounds extremely broad and potentially impossible, but it is restrained by reasonability. When I say all the foreseeable consequences, I am speaking of a reasonable expectation of what will happen, based on the intelligence of the individual and the information they possess at the time.

For example, if some lunatic rigged up an elevator so that the next person to press the button for the seventh floor would blow up the entire building, the person who pushed said button would not be morally responsible for the resulting mayhem and loss of life. After all, there was absolutely no way he could have predicted that such a mundane act would have such dire consequences.

Similarly, we all understand that children do not have the same mental faculties as adults. So if a child, too young to grasp the difference between real guns and toy guns, accidentally shoots their sibling, we know the child is not to blame.

On the other hand, if another madman decided it was fun to drop flaming bowling balls off a highway overpass directly down into four lanes of rush hour traffic, they could not claim that they did not know that would kill people, even if they dropped them without aiming, completely at random, and therefore could say that they didn’t KNOW a fireball would kill a carload of people on a drop by drop basis.

But still, I wonder if my definition of responsibility, restrained by reason as it is, is still too broad and onerous to be effective. In theory it obliges someone to constantly weigh every single decision on the scales of reasoned probability, and that is the sort of thing that sounds right in theory, but in practice would turn someone into a paranoid nervous wreck.

And I am, in some ways, a paranoid nervous wreck, living in constant terror of doing the wrong thing.

And that is just too much. Any set of beliefs, no matter how pure and right they sound on paper, which makes it impossible for the individual to be truly calm or happy has to be viewed as pathological. Systems of belief which demand the impossible are especially suspect in this regard.

If there was a religion where the only way to be spiritually clean and holy was to sprout wings and fly, it would be as pathological as some of the more extreme and unreasonable religions’ sexual mores.

So am I taking on too heavy a burden? I think so. Even for a dedicatedly moral person like myself who is constantly seeking the most ethical and spiritually enlightening path through life and for the world, there has to be some sort of limit based on how much you can actually take on.

And I have taken on a lot. Sure, in my rational mind, I am restricted by what is reasonable and attainable. but I am come to think that under the hood, I sort of feel responsible for everything.

Or at the very least connected to everything, which is the same thing to someone as sensitive as I am. If I am connected to it, I feel like I am a part of it, and if I am a part of it, then I feel I must do something to right the wrongs I feel.

It is a basic act of empathy. Empathy makes us feel the pain of others, and causes us to act to ameliorate that pain, in a sense for the selfish reason of not having to feel it ourselves any more.

And that’s great. It is, in fact, the best thing there is. Unless, like me, you feel connected to everything.

Nobody can survive taking on the whole world’s pain and suffering and injustice, even in the most distant and abstract way. There is just too damned much of it for any individual to handle. There has to be some limit, some inner wall which protects the fragile self from the onrush of empathic overload. A wall marked “RESPONSIBILITY ENDS HERE”.

That does not mean you stop caring, or doing what you can when you can. It just means that you stop feeling like it is all up to you all the time.

That’s a tricky one for someone with my particular cocktail of control and self esteem issues. Controlling people always feel responsible for everything. That is what drives them to try to control everything. This can make a person very competent and effective. It can also make a person batshit crazy.

Combine that with low self-esteem, and you have a person who feels responsible for everything but thinks he is too lame and stupid and worthless and incompetent to actually be able to do anything about and in fact could only make things worse.

Result : a person trapped in a heavy, thick, cold blanket of constant guilt.

I think that is how I have been living without knowing it for a long time. And I am not sure how to get out of it. Clearly I have to build that wall within me to limit the amount of responsibility I feel.

But I like that I care about things. That I feel for things. It is not only part of my noble self-image, it makes me feel like I have taken my little share of the burden of pain. And to me, that’s very important.

But all that feeling for things leaves behind a residue of unfinished emotions and unexpressed thoughts. And I thick this residue might just be part of my problems.

So maybe I need to practice saying “It’s not my fault, there was nothing I could do about it” into the mirror five times a day until it sinks in and I can truly take care of minding my patch and doing what I can without it damn near killing me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.