Who is responsible for your life and your happiness? The answer is simple. You and only you are responsible for your own happiness and life.
“People always blame the circumstances. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who succeed in this world are the people who look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, they make them. “
George Bernard Shaw
We cannot blame genetics, upbringing, parents, education, or society.
You Are Responsible for Your Own Happiness in Any Case
Many people will say that success in life depends a lot on the circumstances. A good family, a good country, a good city, it all affects, it all determines a person. True. Circumstances can help us, and they can help us, but what does that really mean? Due to dire circumstances, I failed? The circumstance is that I was born in the Balkans, where war breaks out every 30 years? So what! What do you get out of it? What do you get out of shifting responsibility to circumstances? The point is not to complain about the circumstances but to do our best within (or despite) the circumstances.
The famous French philosopher Sartre said there is no justification.
There is no excuse; we are responsible for ourselves. They are not circumstances because they do not define you. They are not people around you because they are not you; it is not the country you live in, the job you do, the politicians who lie to you, or the doctors who treat you. It is not the mother who gave birth to you. It is not the Father who made you. They are not neighbors. They are not relatives. They are not colleagues. They are not friends. It is not a horoscope; it is not bad weather; it is not an economic crisis; it is not the fall of the Berlin Wall; it is not a war or peace. No one but you is responsible for you. Whatever happens to you, wherever you are, whoever you are in life, you are responsible to yourself; for your choices, decisions, mistakes and successes, paths and wanderings. You are responsible for everything. You are the authors of yourself, and you are doomed to freedom and, therefore, to responsibility.
This Way of Thinking Can Hurt
And it should hurt. And that pain should wake you up until it’s too late so that you don’t oversleep your life. Take responsibility for everything that happens to you. For all the emotions you feel, for all the actions, for all the decisions, for all the thoughts, and for all your dreams. No one controls you. You are an unseen force; you are a miracle of nature, a weak omnivore without sharp teeth, claws, speed, and strength—a weak omnivore who has ruled the earth because he has unseen power in him.
Only you have power in your life.
And so, give up your excuses. Forget about circumstances; they are as they are. Give up excuses. Give up past failures. For you, what has happened is that the best part of life is yet to come.
In the concentration camps, these fundamental testing institutes, we watched our comrades and witnessed some behaving like pigs, others again as saints. Both possibilities lie in man; what someone accomplishes depends on his decisions, not his conditions.
Viktor Frankl