We like to believe that people are responsible for the choices they make. And to some extent, they are.
If I hurt someone, spend money I don’t have, stay in a destructive relationship, drink too much, refuse to ask for help, or walk away from an opportunity, those choices have consequences. At some point, as adults, we have to take responsibility for what we do.
But there is something missing from this way of thinking. It assumes that all of us are choosing from the same menu.
Imagine someone who becomes overwhelmed whenever life becomes difficult. One person calls a friend. Another goes for a walk. Someone else sits quietly until the feeling passes. Another works harder. Another shuts down. Another drinks.
From the outside, these can look like choices among many available possibilities. But were all of those possibilities actually available to each person?
A child does not begin life knowing all the different ways human beings can respond to difficulty. They learn by living among other people. They watch what happens when their parents become frightened, angry, exhausted, ashamed, or overwhelmed. They experience what happens when they themselves are frightened, angry, exhausted, ashamed, or overwhelmed.
Maybe someone notices. Maybe someone listens. Maybe someone helps them understand what they are feeling and stays with them until it passes.
Or maybe their father drinks. Maybe their mother withdraws. Maybe everyone pretends nothing happened. Maybe anger becomes shouting. Maybe difficulty is handled by working harder. Maybe nobody asks for help.
None of this is presented to the child as a lesson in coping. It’s simply how life works. Over thousands of repetitions, certain ways of responding become familiar. Others may never become familiar at all.
Yet we sometimes talk as though all the possibilities remain sitting there alongside one another, waiting to be chosen. Ask for help instead. Set a boundary. Calm yourself down. Talk about what happened. Walk away. Trust someone.
But you cannot use a language you never learned to speak. And knowing that a language exists is not the same as knowing how to speak it.
This is where the idea of personal responsibility becomes more complicated.
We might imagine that every person stands before an enormous menu containing the full range of human possibilities, and then we judge people according to what they order. But nobody begins adulthood with that menu. We arrive with a menu that has already been partially written.
Some possibilities are familiar. Some are frightening. Some seem shameful. Some seem impossible. Some require capacities we never developed. And some may be so far outside our experience that we don’t see them at all.
Most of the time, we don’t experience this as limitation. We experience it as reality.
The person who never asks for help may not think, I am choosing self-reliance instead of asking someone to help me. They may simply think, I have to deal with this.
The person who becomes quiet when someone is angry may not think, I am choosing appeasement instead of asserting myself. Becoming quiet may happen before another possibility even appears.
From the outside, the alternatives can look obvious. From inside the person’s organization, they may barely exist.
None of this means that people have no responsibility for what they do. But perhaps responsibility is more complicated than we have made it.
We make choices from within what we have learned. From what we can imagine. From what our bodies can tolerate. From the capacities we have developed and the possibilities our experience has taught us to recognize.
We have agency, but our agency is conditioned.
And that raises a different question. Before asking why someone made the choice they made, perhaps we should also ask:
What choices could they actually see?