I'm depressed. As I've spent a great deal of time thinking about why I'm depressed I've come to realize it (in part, at least) has to do with a fairly small but rigid set of principles by which I try to live my life. They serve admirably to make sure I do my best to avoid harming others other than in specific situations and to lead my life, I once thought, in a manner which would be as beneficial as possible to the world I live in. One of the strongest of them is the tenet that one must always take responsibility for those things one is able. Your actions are your responsibility, as is your speech. But one problem is that there's no upper bound on what I should take responsibility for, under the assumption that those who will, should.
I'm rereading Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! which is an excellent book about a man who, from what I know about him, I admire deeply. Earlier tonight, I read a passage he'd written about his time at Los Alamos working on the Manhattan Project. It was a time of personal stress for him (his wife died of Tuberculosis around then after a long illness) and a time when all the men and women working on the project were working under a crushing responsibility - both professionally and, in many cases, ethically. I have found myself going back to that passage several times. Here it is.
Then there was John von Neumann, the great mathematician. We used to go for walks on Sunday. We’d walk in the canyons, often with Bethe and Bob Bacher. It was a great pleasure. And von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of von Neumann’s advice. It’s made me a very happy man ever since. (emphasis mine)