It can vary a lot how strongly we feel responsible for something. Depending on the situation we might want responsibility or not. A sense of duty can motivate us, or enthusiasm for a project itself, or the ambition to complete something that we startet, or to fix something that we messed up.
Maybe you can notice that some people around you take responsibility more often than others. Maybe you want to take some more responsibility yourself, or want to give away some. Beside the question of how much responsibility we want other aspects are also relevant. For example, it is common to distribute responsibility according to qualifications and abilities of the available people. Then, we must earn responsibility. There can be a structure that we need to be sorted into, work our way up, and get assigned responsibilities accordingly. In an economic field this is often connected with a higher salary, pushing people who are not really interested in responsibility to accept it for the money. Some handle it well anyway, others maybe not so much.
How much responsibility we want depends mainly on two things. First, it is important how we judge our own abilities. Are we convinced that we can do something well, or better than the person doing it now, the we often want the responsibility for it. On the other hand, if I do not understand the situation or believe that I cannot improve it, then I will try to escape any responsibility. This belief is dependent on the experience that we had in life so far. If we succeeded often, got approval for what we did on our own, then we tend to believe that we will get things done somehow. But when we had to experience rejection, when our work was mostly not valued, then we tend to believe that there is nothing we can do.
Second, it is important that we feel treated fairly, that we are convinced to get a reasonable share of all the things distributed in the world. The feeling of always missing out does not encourage to take responsibility. Especially if I have no hope of getting a bigger share as a result of my efforts. Additionally, if I succeed, I would also get the responsibility for missing out until now. As soon as I blame someone else for that, I will have little interest in giving that up. It is much easier to take and accept responsibility when I am convicted that up to now, things went mostly well and in my interest.
And this is where we need to start if we want to step out of the role of a victim, developing towards a self-reliant and responsible person. We must be judge for our life, we must determine what went well and what did not. We usually do so based on life goals that we adopted at some point. Of course, others can also judge our life, but it will only be relevant for us if we accept the judgement. Normally we only do that in case of an authority that we look up to, or if we feel validated in the judgement that we already have. In rare cases a good argument can also have an effect on us. An important first step is to know that we must be the judge of our life, because we are the one experiencing it. We can consider any input, but ultimately we decide for us.
In a second step we must also select the criteria that we use to come up with a judgement. They are the deciding factor. Only when we think about the criteria, question them, define them fully conscious, then we can consider the resulting judgement to be our own. We often reduce the criteria to a single number, like income, titles, financial wealth, or how closely our life matches that of an idol or the promoted standard version of a life. Avoiding pain and suffering while maximizing pleasure and comfort is also a typical criteria for success. The comparison with others, who get much recognition and admiration, or who are simply already better at whatever we are currently doing, cement the certainty that we are not good enough, that we missed out.
Who wants to take responsibility for that? Then it is better to be a victim. As long as we are convinced by that, we have not yet understood the meaning of our life. We compare it to other people’s life, with extraneous life goals. Both does not need to play a role in the assessment of the life we had so far. We are unique as a human, and we all have different goals when we are born here. There is certainly some overlap, but we did not come here with the task to copy someone else’s life. None of the material wealth that we accumulate can be carried along when we die. But, as long as we consider ourself to be nothing more than a heap of particles, it does not matter. With that worldview we cannot find any purpose in life. We need to see our life in the context of the previous and future life and the development of mankind as a whole. Only then can we see and judge the value of our life. We can begin to think this way as soon as we notice that we must be more than the body we can see. Until then it can already be helpful to consider that it is not our possessions that matter, but our experiences.