How to Avoid Responsibility

Most of us were raised to take responsibility for our actions, particularly as we grew older. However, responsibility is sometimes woefully overrated. Here is a quick primer on what to do when you don’t feel like being a grownup.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Yourself (or, more accurately, your ego)
• People who are as eager to shirk responsibility
• Brown-nosers, sycophants, yes-men
• Self-defeating behaviors
• Unsorted emotional baggage

1. Believe your own hype. You have to believe that you are as good and as wonderful as people say you are. This has nothing to do with self-confidence and everything to do with the need for external validation. You must be told that you are great, otherwise what’s the point? Grown-ups know that they are not always great, and you are trying to avoid getting to this point.

2. Surround yourself with people who tell you what you want to hear. Who wants to be told anything that is contrary to your perceived greatness? Sycophants, brown-nosers, and suck-ups are ideal to keep around you, so that your ego can be constantly inflated and you can remain in ignorant bliss of your shortcoming

3. Ignore any advice that leads to personal growth and self-revelation. It is often said that growing older is mandatory while growing up is optional. Growing up means that you actually face the not-so-great parts about ourselves and owning up to how we have contributed to most of the messes we’ve made in our lives. Where’s the fun in that?

4. Keep your baggage packed. We all have baggage that we have accumulated during our stay on this earth. Most have outlived their usefulness, yet we still tote them around. In order to continue to avoid being a grown-up, it is important to not unpack that baggage and sort out the useful from the destructive. You must keep it packed and stored in a dark, remote corner (preferably where you can’t readily see it) and tote it around like a pack mule into each and every relationship and situation you encounter.

5. Stay within your comfort zone. Change for the better occurs when one sails away from safe harbors and into unchartered waters. But then you’d have to be accountable for the lessons you learn and for finding undiscovered parts about yourself (and maybe some rediscovered parts), and that could lead to personal growth and (there’s that word again) responsibility. So keep creating situations where you are in control, you can stay distant, you can not be engaged, and you can put barriers between yourself and what you really want.

Tips & Warnings

• With regular practice of the above steps, you too can remain at the emotional level of a six-year-old. This is particularly key as our society continues to reinforce instant gratification and the pass-the-buck mentality...not to mention cryo-preservation and plastic surgery, so that your external shell can most closely match your inner one.

[CaPagrl]

on 12/21/2008 ROFL, good stuff!!