>But I can see that you believe in total control, and hence total responsibility, and that's fine. Whatever works for each person is fine by me.
>
>Not necessarily total control, but, yes - total responsibility. I can even take the concept of personal responsibility to extremes {g}. For example, I believe that if I walk down the street and a flower pot falls out of a window on to my head, ultimately I am responsible for it because I was the one who made the decision to go for a walk at that particular time and on that particular route. Had I made different decisions, I would not have been there for the flower pot to fall on {s}.


This is a strange way of thinking about responsibility. Responsibility is normally associated with cause and effect. Who causes an effect is responsible for that effect. You do not cause the flower pot to fall. But if this ideology way works for you then fine.

In my opinion, you are not responsible for the random events that affect your life, you neither cause them and often you cannot control them. However, you can in theory control your attitude to the effect that those events create. This is response-ability, the ability to respond. That is different from responsibility as in causing an event. However, even one’s attitude is the result of influences that were beyond your control regardless of whether you believe in nature or nurture or both. Your intelligence, character, nature and hence attitude to life are the result either of genetics, environment or both. But not just your own efforts.

Most people do not want to go down this line of thinking because it means giving up too much credit for the good things in their lives. “I did this and I did that and that is why I have so much of this or that. See how clever and hard working I am!”. We want to assume credit for the good events and, usually, ascribe to bad luck, fate, God, (insert your belief here) for the bad.