Everybody is different therefore everyone has their own virtues. The one virtue I believe everyone should have is responsibility. There were many virtues to choose from but I believe this virtue at the core covers almost every other virtue out there.
What is Responsibility
My definition of responsibility is taking ownership of our job and having accountability of the things we do. If you did something bad, you need own up to it and take the consequences for it. Believe it or not this is something that we are taught growing up but we may not realize it. For example, something as simple as doing homework was our responsibility as a kid growing up because that was our job.
Why Responsibility
It's quite simple why I chose this. No matter what a person does as long as they are responsible I could forgive everything else. I can't speak on behalf of everybody in the world but I believe most people would feel the same way. If you don't agree, do share an example of where you can't forgive someone for being responsible.
For example, let's say someone accidentally banged my Tesla (if I had one). It's not a crazy crash but maybe they left some scratches and a dent on the car. Accidents happen and I could forgive them for this if they were responsible and left a note for contact or even waited for me to show up and apologize.
When Irresponsible People F'd Me Up
There were many times when irresponsible people hurt me but I wouldn't say physically; it drained me mentally or impacted me in a way that wasn't positive. For example during group assignments in high school or university, we always have that "free rider" which in short is someone that puts in little to no effort to try to get the same grade as everybody else in the group. This happened to me a lot in the past when I was still studying and it did make me suffer due to the time I had to spend to do other peoples part etc.
In life, I also experienced a lot of cases of broken promises. If a promise is made, by right the person should keep their promise. I believe it's very irresponsible to make a promise and then not keep it. It would be way better if a person didn't make any promises if they weren't confident that they could keep it.
I think the biggest time a lack of responsibility hurt me was during the times I was bullied which was from elementary school to high school. I know I've mentioned bullying in my blog a few times but this is true. The people that bullied me weren't considering the impact it made to my life. For those that don't know the bullying gave me trust issues and did make me a bit anti-social/socially awkward. To be fair though, these bullies were still not mature yet at the time and kids are generally prone to being irresponsible but it's the job of their parents and adult figures to teach them this.
Since we are on web3, I thought this would be a great example. If you are into crypto and NFTs, I'm sure you are aware of NFT projects or cryptocurrencies that rug pull. For those that don't know, rug pull is basically abandoning a project for NFTs and for crypto it's like dumping to zero. If you notice the picture above, this is an NFT called Solana Squirrels which I got during the bull run. This is a project that seemed great. They had a good website, there was good engagement and there was a decent community around. Anyways there was a fallout among the creators and the project died. This is another case of being irresponsible people hurting me or should I say my money :'). Anyways I still have this NFT if anybody wants to buy do let me know in the comments. I'll sell for minimum 100 USD even though now it's worth nothing but it has some story and history of ShawnNFT behind it!
Concluding Thoughts
Unfortunately, not everybody in life is willing to be responsible even when becoming adults. This is something that is out of our control. We can only control our own actions and for those actions we make, we should have responsibility over them. If everyone was responsible, I truly believe this world would be 100x better than it is now!