How To Live Up To Your Responsibilities
How do you live up to your responsibilites?
My responsibilities are the many things that I have to do every day that I don't want to do, and very often I look at my diary and I see I'm doing some afternoon speech, or I've got to go, and I would desperately love to hear the phone go, and someone say it's been cancelled. I get very close to thinking, 'can I pretend I've got flu, can I say I'm ill?' And then think, 'No I can't'. Duty, obligation, responsibility, these are all words that I've fought against all my life, because I'm not sure how true they are. If you feel you're doing something out of responsibility then don't do it. But do project how you'll feel if you don't do it, and then realize that actually, the responsibility is something you want to do. So, me cancelling things, me not doing the things I've agreed to do, me reneging on my word, would make me deeply unhappy. It's the point, I suppose. Even unhappier than having to turn up and do it. And I think drugs and alcohol are things that overcome a sense of responsibility, you no longer care so much about whether or not you let people down. And so I think that's one of their dangers, is that it stops you having a sense of responsibility, really. We used to say it degenerates the moral self-- the Victorians used to say of alcohol, or of drug users. It's not quite that, I think it's sadder; you don't care. And ultimately not caring about yourself is not caring about other people. When you're not caring about letting other people down, it means you don't care living with yourself, having let people down. Cause we all know that any purpose of virtue is to be happy, I mean that's the earliest philosophy of Plato, exactly that. Noticing that virtue of itself is not the end; happiness is the end. And its very hard to be happy if you're not good, facing responsibilities, and its very easy to be good if you're happy.
