General News
5 July, 2026
Call the doctor: The Weight Of Responsibility
Dr Felix Ritson says responsibility can be stressful, but it also gives life purpose, strengthens trust and creates opportunities. From washing dishes to raising children or landing a plane, every responsibility reflects something we value enough to protect.
I do realise that now that I’m a parent I have to be careful to avoid filling these columns with baby related content, a bit like new parents tend to do with their facebook page or instagram.
However I thought that writing about responsibility would be a fair compromise.
The duties and requirements held by people differ vastly, yet all contain a unifying experience we call responsibility.
Whether it be doing the dishes at any given frequency, completing an annual tax return, getting your kids to school, ensuring your architectural design of a major civil infrastructure project is sound or safely landing a passenger plane; they all contain responsibility.
This happens when we are responsibleforsomething and hence are required toact, either proactively or in response. The word responsibility stems from the latin word for “to respond” or “to answer”.
We might also call our responsibilities obligations, or things for which we are accountantable, but not often do we call them necessities.
What makes responsibilities so significant is that there is technically an element of choice and free will involved, giving them more existential weight.
Consider that we don’t feel it a responsibility to breathe, eat or keep ourselves warm.
We become responsible for things not that we need, but that we value.
It is our inherent desire to act in accordance with our values and our free will not to, that contributes why responsibility can be stressful.
Acting in accordance with our values is the perpetual challenge of a human life well lived.
Some people reading this may have already felt a degree of angst merely from seeing the word “responsibility” so many times, others not all.
We all have a different journey and different responsibilities, and all have different ways in which we are affected by and deal with them.
I wonder if it is responsibility that causes more stress to us humans than other experience.
In times of great hardship, I often hear people claim they are most worried about their ability to care for those they love, not so much their own wellbeing.
However, responsibilities come with benefits.
Keeping the dishes washed makes it easier to eat and perhaps garners praise from visitors, taxation funds our hospitals and roads, getting your kids to school supports the wellbeing of the ones you love, designing bridges and flying planes pays one's way in life and probably comes with a great deal of satisfaction and sense of purpose.
Furthermore, responsibility brings with it a degree of power, whether it be financial, professional, reputational, influential, intellectual, etc. (Spiderman's Uncle Ben had it the wrong way around).
We learn better when under manageable pressure.
Knowledge is power. Jobs with more responsibility tend to come with more autonomy.
I was once told by a political party worker that you can measure power by who is in someone's phone's contact list.
Being someone people trust, and is perceived as responsible results in greater opportunities.
Thankfully the power we have over those we love is usually exercised with grace and goodwill.
So responsibility is a good thing. It occurs as a result of our values and inturn provides for us.
I encourage the young people I see in clinic to seek responsibility, and all the good that comes with it.
In next fortnight's column I will discuss some of the strategies I use to manage the stress that can come with responsibility.