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I’ll be 70 next month and wanted to write something related to that. To come up with something I thought might be worthy, I reviewed my thoughts on career, relationships, money, mental health, physical health, and the meaning of life. One thought rose to the top: that a crucial yet under-discussed attribute is responsibility.
I feel your resistance already: It's obvious. It’s preachy. That's all true but an ode to responsibility is my best guess as to what might be most valuable.
To take a current example, if early on, everyone was responsible in keeping social distancing, hand washing, and self-isolating if sick, countless lives and literally trillions of dollars would have been saved.
Of course, responsibility is relevant to work. I cringe when people have admitted to me, often with pride, that they do the least work they can get away with. Three such people particularly stand out. One works for a mass transit system. She makes $120,000 a year and bragged that she figured out how to get away with working just one hour a day. A carpenter who works for a major city said that his crew tears down a fence and builds it, tears the same fence down, and builds it again. Why? Because there’s not enough work to do and they want to look busy for the supervisor and taxpayers passing by. An employee at a car manufacturing plant bragged to me that many of the employees would come in stoned and play pranks such as making a car rattle by tossing a bolt into a car’s axle before they sealed it. When I asked why, he said, “To drive the quality-assurance people nuts trying to figure what’s causing the rattle.” Responsibility to do the right thing, to be contributory, indeed, to make the most of one’s heartbeats is, for me, after 70 years on this planet, our most sacred obligation.
Marriage is held together by responsibility. After the throes of initial infatuation have faded, the couple, with eyes now clear, must face the challenge of two people with different desires and limitations living under the same roof for a lifetime. Certainly, that’s more difficult amid the stay-home edicts but even otherwise, different values around work-life balance, sexual preferences, communication, spending, substance use, even the bedroom’s temperature are a never-ending and often changing challenge. Financial stress, health issues, and/or children, magnify the challenge. Core to a marriage’s surviving and ideally thriving is a sense of responsibility to each other and to the pledge, “For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.”
One more example of responsibility. I’m not an America-first kind of guy. I feel equally responsible to someone in Bangladesh as in Berkeley. That manifests in, for example, choosing to forgo fun time in favor of writing something practical every day in Psychology Today. In my six years here, my more than 1,700 posts have had almost 11 million views across the globe. I thank Psychology Today's editor-in-chief Kaja Perina for the privilege and my wife of 43 years Dr. Barbara Nemko for her patience in reading many of my drafts.
That sense of responsibility makes me hope to able to continue to work for a long time and be like Isaac Asimov. After he had written 450 books, he was asked, “What would you do if you knew you had just one year to live?” His response: “Type faster.”
I read this aloud on YouTube.
