[1146] Check Please

I’m mostly sick of writing about accountability. It feels like the thing that just bubbles up incessantly. Whether I’m listening to stories from people I know, a podcast, or just carrying on through a normal day, the consequences of whether or not the practice of accountability takes place play out.

There’s many ways to get accountability wrong indefinitely. I think it’s easiest to see in relationships.

When you’re unduly possessive or controlling, you’re not being accountable to your insecurity. When you’re trying to spend or lie your way out of your bad behavior, again, clear as they can get indications that you are in the wrong. Overt praise and what’s colloquially been hijacked as “love bombing” is a good way to obscure the landscape of your broken mind by what’s flatly emotional manipulation of your target.

You can also get your sense of accountability wrong by adopting a hero story. That is, you can pretend your entire life that you’re waging some kind of personal war against unjust forces in a way that only you can understand. It requires no sacrifice, no team, and no paper trail. It’s the story you tell yourself to quell any rebellious feelings towards your boss and unjust work environment. The kids and the mortgage, after all.

You get accountability wrong with apathy. You’re just not going to play? That’s an unhealthy reframe that pretends you don’t have a choice. You’re just gonna live as though you have a personal island, and use your ability to talk about “reality” to acknowledge and designate all that you observe to be fucked up, but it’s not about you in any meaningful way. The unironic amount of attention paid as you pretend to lounge or hunker down I guess we can just ignore.

There’s a component to accountability that requires a scientific ethic or sensibility. If all we needed to do was amass information by literally counting everything or making infinite lists of facts and their counters, we could exist in an arbitrarily held-harmless space, just awash and overwhelmed by too much to operate with. In science, the more you’re demonstrably wrong, the better your chances for arriving at better truths. The more you can describe how you might be catastrophically wrong, the better your chances of shifting a paradigm of assumptions and actions entirely.

This is illustrated just in how we’ve come to understand toxic chemicals in what we’ve built things with. This is constantly shaping our understanding of what constitutes “healthy.” This is under-girding panic about screens and hours faux-socializing. This speaks to the power behind a metaphysical belief system where all roads can terminate at “divine judgement” regardless of how suspiciously it aligns with any given era or adherent’s opinion already.

But, it’s also not a mystery to us or anyone watching when something meaningful isn’t being accounted for. You live in a formerly safe place where the police are getting hamstrung by a new philosophy about crime? Shit snaps into focus. You used to eat every day and a new Republican bill takes food out of your mouth because you’re a poor kid who doesn’t deserve it? You don’t have to understand convoluted debased moralizing like you will hunger. I think when it comes to a “passable” sense of a life worth living, what needs to be accounted for is built in and built in deep.

It gets more complicated when you dive in to social circles, preferences, monetary policy, or navigating an endless series of dangers. Should the rich entitled 60-something woman I was chatting with yesterday learn to actively listen and refrain from being condescending towards her older husband? I think so, but that’s with a snapshot of their dynamic and a whole personally opinionated framework of observed and engaged conversational dynamics. Can it account for theirs in particular? Or, can it account enough*?

Right at this point, we need to look at motivations and goals. I don’t need her to change anything about her dynamic with him. We paid to use their garage and he likes to supply cheap beer and chat on the porch. If the second we leave they go inside and he beats her with his cane, still, does not change a thing about what we needed and used them for.

But what if my goal is to get a handle on a “healthy” or “healthi-er” relationship dynamic than the one I’m in or about one I hope to get in the future? Well, now my concern about her rudeness informs how I interrogate my preferences or approach if I encounter the same thing. Certainly, people love and care for partners, parents, kids, family and friends who are incredibly rude to them constantly. The accountability is still personal though. I can’t account for their dynamic, just how it makes me think and feel about mine.

So, it’s “enough” to get me thinking. Whether or not I suppress those thoughts, write about those thoughts, or make excuses for those thoughts is the work.

If you don’t know how or what to be accountable to, panic sets in. Luckily, the logic of capitalism, norms or radicals, and conservative practice immediately step in to tell you what you need. You need to free Palestine! You need to find Jesus! You need 2.5 kids and a nice car! You need to work 3 jobs and grind and hustle! You need increasingly specific degrees and specializations and to reinvent yourself every couple years to keep up! You need to be in debt, but told through a story of pretty pictures and memes!

If you return to the question of your goal and examination of what everything on offer makes you think, you can cut through.

For me, my goal is to feel free enough to do what I want, when I want. Kids don’t comport with that. Jesus certainly doesn’t. Debt has a way of making options feel exceedingly restricted and clouding even thoughts about what feels possible. My goal could, and has, led to some choice paralysis and obscene amount of time spent alone, but I’m not confused about why it’s my goal or why it needs to be foundational in pursuing or building towards other goals. I also don’t want unreasonable hard to articulate or impossible to achieve things.

In order for me to be “free enough,” I need a basically functioning country. I need principles that aren’t being whispered into the ears of eager and motivated ideologues mostly steering the ship. I need to encounter people who feel like they have some purchase on their domains and lives. I need to exchange and relate in ways that can inform and empower either side. Where, how, and when I can be more accountable comes into greater focus. Aspirations begin to look like daily achievable activities on the way to getting somewhere meaningful purposefully.

I think it’s normal to have your sense of accountability to be “implicit.” It’s whatever “feels right.” It’s what was handed down or dictated. It’s part hero story, part excuse-ridden child, and part exhausted checked-out ironic solopsist.

It’s a wonder how often we feel lost without intuiting that we never understood or articulated the goal in the first place.

What kind of friend or family member do you wish to be? What kind of citizen? How would you need to act in order to develop a sense of what to reasonably expect in return? What would you need to learn or lean into to fix what you already describe as wrong? Where can you place your discomfort or confusion so that it serves more than suffers?