Dinner with my ex
Responsibility cannot be divided — that was the "conclusion" of a pleasant dinner.
Good steak, wine flowing freely, and sitting across the table is my ex, who's studying to become a top magistrate.
I can't quite tell you how we got there. There's a point in the evening when topics stop following any logic, and at some moment we find ourselves talking about a line in the Constitution. Article 27, first paragraph. Six words:
"Criminal responsibility is personal."
It means no one can be held accountable for someone else's actions. And so, flipped the other way, it means this: your actions remain yours. You answer for what you did, regardless of who led you there.
It doesn't matter if someone pushed you — your part doesn't get lighter because of it. Their fault is theirs and yours is yours. They add up, they don't divide.
I dug my heels in. I was looking at it from a human perspective, not a legal one like she was.
Because I know this mechanism well.
You end up inside a situation. You didn't really choose it — you just fell into it. People who drag you along, who steer you, who put you in situations you never would have considered on your own. And inside all that, you do things. Things that, if someone else described them to you, you'd say "what were you thinking."
And the sentence you tell yourself afterward, always, is that one: "it's not my fault, they led me there."
It's an incredibly convenient sentence. It leaves you intact. The thing happened, the damage too, but you come out clean because you've offloaded the responsibility onto someone else.
Well, that line in the Constitution says it doesn't work that way. And it doesn't say so to punish you: it says so because it's the only way a person can stand on their own two feet. To feel alive, and to be alive.
Because if your responsibility depends on who was around you, then your life depends on who's around you too. You can't have one without the other. Either you're responsible for what you do — and then you're also master of where you're going. Or you're not, and then you move wherever you get pushed.
And would you really want to live like that?
But at this point someone might say: I don't choose everything. True. You don't choose who you meet, what they say to you, what information lands on you.
But let's break it down step by step, because what matters is this:
One. How you read what comes at you.
Someone tells you something. Do you take it as truth just as it is, or do you weigh it? Because most of us don't weigh anything: we just absorb it, especially if the person talking has a face that convinces us.
Two. How you interpret it.
The same sentence, the same proposal, the same evening — for two different people they mean different things. That difference isn't in the words. You put it there.
Three. What you do with it.
Between the information and the action there's a gap. Small — sometimes just a second. But it's there, and it's yours: it's the only place where you can still stop before you move.
Four. How deep you dig before you move.
This is the one I skip most often. Acting before I've understood, and then building the thought on top to justify myself. Which is the opposite of thinking — it's thinking backwards, starting from what I've already done.
Four things. Doesn't seem like much. But it's exactly inside those four things that it gets decided whether a life is yours or belongs to the people around you.
A sentence, on its own, means nothing
I want to linger on point two, because I think that's where everything is decided.
Take any sentence. "I don't think this is the right moment for you."
What does it mean? You don't know. It could be someone who cares about you and is afraid for you. It could be someone holding you back because if you move, they have to move too. It could be someone talking about their own life and accidentally saying it to you. It could be a challenge dressed up as advice.
That sentence, on its own, is empty. It holds infinite possibilities inside it. You don't find the meaning — you put it there.
And once you've put it there, that meaning becomes the reason you do one thing instead of another. You move from there.
That's why the whole "they dragged me into it" argument doesn't hold up. The people around you don't hand you a finished action. They hand you sentences. Then you choose the meaning — in a second, often without even realizing it — and the action follows, from that meaning.
I learned this on a beach in Indonesia, a few years ago. I was sitting watching children playing with a kite in front of a sunset, and I realized I was the one deciding what I had in front of me:
▎ We are the ones who choose what to look at and what we want to see. This is just a family on the beach — we can choose what it means. What matters isn't what's in front of your eyes, but how you choose to see it.
— June 30, 2022
It applies to a sunset and it applies to a sentence spoken carelessly at dinner. It's the exact same gesture: something comes before you, and you decide what it is.
Now flip it, because this is where it gets serious.
If that's how it works for what comes at you, it works the same way for what goes out from you. Your sentences arrive empty to someone else too. Yours get filled by another person, who puts their own meaning inside — their own day, their own fear.
You say something halfway, in a rush, maybe just to close a conversation. The person on the other end builds a decision on top of it.
So you're responsible twice over. For how you read what people tell you, and for what you hand to others. You can't control the meaning they'll attach to it — that's theirs. But you can know that they will attach one, and choose more carefully what you say.
We're all inside the same mechanism, each of us reading the others and being read.
If that gesture is yours — and it is yours, always, even when you think you're the one being pushed — then responsibility begins long before what you did. It begins in the moment you decided what it meant.
Back to the table for a moment
Because if I stopped here I'd have sold you something false — the idea that it's enough to lock yourself inside and decide everything on your own.
At some point in the evening I laid out my version. The one I just told you: it's you, full stop, no excuses.
And she stopped me.
She explained that the law absolutely looks at circumstances. It looks at who pushed you, what state you were in, how much real margin you actually had. There are mitigating factors, there are situations where a person is coerced and bears less responsibility, or none at all.
Except none of those things erase your part. They weigh it, they reduce it — they don't remove it. It stays there, with your name on it.
And as she said it, I understood something that my version alone hadn't produced.
That if responsibility is personal, it's not because everyone stands alone. It's exactly the opposite. No one would write a rule like that for someone living alone on an island — there you can do whatever you want, no one answers because there's no one there.
That line exists because we live pressed up against each other. Because the things I do land on someone, always. It's coexistence that makes responsibility necessary, not solitude.
So no, I'm not telling you to ignore everyone and decide things alone. I'm telling you the opposite: that precisely because you answer for yourself, and answer in your own name, you have to take everything into account — other people, context, consequences.
Freedom and the bill are the same thing seen from two sides.
Before I let you go
Because in the end, a law is nothing more than a rule of coexistence written by people who had seen how things turn out. But that line — Article 27 — in my view isn't speaking to criminals. It speaks to everyone: it tells you that you're the only one who can answer for yourself, and that therefore you might as well start deciding.
So here's today's question.
Think about the last thing you did that you didn't really want to do. The one where you felt dragged along.
Now remove everyone else from the scene. Remove them completely: no one told you anything, no one pushed you.
What's left of what you did?
What's left is yours. And it's the only piece you can still do something about.
Fifty-four attempts to become better. This is the twenty-fourth. Best, Stefano.
If you feel like it, reply to this email and tell me. I read every single one, myself.
Fifty-four attempts to become better.
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