"But at Least It Is My Life"

Charles Fried offers a brisk and energetic account of what it is to lead a life:

Everything that matters to a person or to persons in general, everything humanly of value, is first of all experienced by individual persons. I now take the next step; and it is a large one. Everything that matters to persons, that is humanly significant, is chosen by individual person, one by one. Here, as I use the word responsibility, it is I who may be accused of dealing in metaphors, but consider the sense in which a belief—a quite ordinary belief—can be said to be chosen by the one who believes it. The matter of belief, whether it is what a person directly perceives of the outside world or what others tell him, must somehow come to a man's consciousness, and there he must weigh ;it, decide whether to credit or to dismiss it as an illusion, a mistake, a falsehood. Overwhelmingly, these judgments are snap: almost everything I see I accept as really there without giving it a second thought, but I do give it a first thought. Mostly if someone tells me a simple thing like “Take your umbrella, it is raining,” I do not pause to consider whether to accept that it is in fact raining. And yet I must take in what was said and make a snap judgment that the person who is talking to me is in earnest or joking, a normal observer or a madman. I may judge credulously, impetuously, foolishly, or ignorantly, but these are all modes of belief and they are mine.

And so it is with my judgments of what I should do, what is good or bad, right or wrong. However much my choice may be influenced by prejudice, emotion, fear of others, it is still I who must choose before I act. And the beliefs, choices, and actions that make up the human world are those of individuals—discrete points of perception, thought, judgment, and choice. They may coalesce in cultures, spirits of the time, but these are made up of individual ;perceptions, conclusions, choices, actions. And each individual experiences these as ineluctably his, whatever else they may be. In this sense he is responsible for all of them.

--Charles Fried, Modern Liberty 20-1 (2007)