Are You as Responsible as You Want to Be? Questions to consider

It’s tempting to be irresponsible. As Freud would term it, to let your id reign. For example, if you work as little as you can get away with, there’s more time for play, for example playing or watching sports or video games. And irresponsible play can be more fun: risky sex, mind-altering drugs, treating the highway like a speedway. Indeed, I’ve noticed an increase in the number of cars darting in and out of lanes at a zillion miles an hour.

Yet I want to risk being a spoil-sport, like the dour, finger-wagging father or cleric often portrayed in the media: from The Scarlet Letter’s Reverend Dimmesdale to the eponymous father in The Great Santini to Game of Thrones’ Tywin Lannister.

My Psychology Today article today makes the case for the primacy of responsibility and then asks you questions to help you decide if you're as responsible as you'd like to be.

7 Suggestions for Becoming More Diligent

Imagine that your counselor emailed you between sessions to ask how you’re doing. Or that your friend promised to help you on Saturday at 9 and, voila, there s/he was. Or that your romantic partner remembered that you dislike cilantro and when phoning for takeout, made sure that nothing had cilantro.

Diligence is one of those virtues that seem to have gone a bit out of fashion, along with duty, discipline, responsibility, and restraint. Yet diligence has always been and always will be at the hub of accomplishment and, among the discerning, of respectability.

But how to get more diligent? Ay, there’s the rub. My Psychology Today article today offers my best but I fear inadequate suggestions:

On Turning 70 The thing I most want to tell you

I’ll be 70 next month and wanted to write something special. 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. I talk about it in my Psychology Today article today.

Tough! Is being intolerant of bad behavior an underappreciated value?

Previous articles in my occasional series on values include one that invites readers to place themselves on 12 continua, and three articles on values that are tough to live by: discipline, hard work, and responsibility. 

Today’s article aggregates those three: It makes a case for toughness. It's potentially applicable in the widest range of contexts, as the article attempts to demonstrate.

In Defense of Duty

Duty, alas, has lost stature compared with such values as autonomy, creativity, and resistance.  In my PsychologyToday.com article today, I argue that's not good for society.
 

The Decline of Duty: A Cause of America's Decline...and You?

For time immemorial, discipline, responsibility (duty,) and impulse control have been key to improving humankind.

Today, alas, they often are deemed less important than creativity, celebrating difference, and questioning authority.

In my PsychologyToday.com article today, I argue that's reason for lament. 

An Ode to Discipline

Discipline, duty, efficiency, restraint, hard work, soberness.  

We wave away such words as puritanical anachronisms, out of touch with newer values: find your passion, do what feels good, life's short; eat dessert first! And the "progress" accelerates:

• State-sanctioned lotteries and casinos have burgeoned despite their predominantly hurting the poor, who can least afford to lose. The ultimate in regressive taxation.

• Two-thirds(!) of workers take sick days when not sick.  Twelve percent said they took sick days just to watch March Madness! That's so societally accepted that corporations aren't embarrassed to push their recreational product by telling people to take a sick day. For example, the ad below was sponsored by a consortium of Tahoe hotels and casinos, the one below it by the Weather Network.
  
  
    
  The cheat-if-you-can ethos is yet one more reason  employers hire as few people and automate as many positions as possible.

• Worst of all has been the increased use of mind- and body-damaging drugs. And now, a majority of Americans favor legalizing pot while almost no one (I'm an exception) advocates banning tobacco or even alcohol. They have long devastated humankind but adding wide use of pot, coke, heroin, meth, and party drugs I can't even name, would cause enormous additional damage to health (disease and traffic accidents,) to families, to workplaces. I have written an essay providing a mountain of evidence that legalizing "mere" pot is a nightmare for America. I challenge you to make a stronger counterargument.

We now have a half-century of experience with Stones/Dylan/Beatles/Grateful Dead-inspired libertinism, the permissive society. Are we so sure the permissive ethos has been a net good? For example, while of course, some young people have an excellent work ethic, millions of others will accept only a fine or slacker job, or make minimal effort to find any job, and instead hang out on their parents' sofa and play video games or watch soap operas, perhaps getting high. Their parents and especially their grandparents don't begin to understand such a lack of work ethic and neither can I.

The world would be far better if we all accepted that hard, honest work is not an option but a societal, even cosmic, duty--even if the job is far from ideal. True, there are no longer enough good jobs to go around but there are enough acceptable jobs for all but the weakest employees. And yes, a job as dishwasher, factory worker, sewage-treatment plant worker, or hotel cleaner is--with a reasonable employer--an acceptable job. It seems cosmically wrong for able-bodied people to reject low-level work in favor of letting a family member or the taxpayer pay them for not working.

Lest you wonder if I practice what I preach, no I never worked in a sewage-treatment plant but I was a bookkeeping clerk with a shared desk in Harlem, for two years worked the night shift as a New York City cab driver and, to this day, at almost 64 years old, work 60+ hours a week, at least half of which for no pay. For example, this is my 1,244th blog post, all carefully written and edited. I just finished editing it after midnight.

Yet some people would rather let the taxpayer support them  for 99 weeks than accept a mediocre job. I think little of such people.  

As magnificent as is Beethoven's Ode to Joy, I believe that at this stage in society's evolution, we might do better to listen to an Ode to Discipline.