23/08/2026
When you accept responsibility and ownership for your life, you begin to walk a different path. Call it enlightenment if you like, although I’m not necessarily talking about religion or spirituality. If that word doesn’t sit comfortably with you, call it life’s path or life’s journey.
I spent a huge portion of my life blaming other people, circumstances, bad luck, and whatever other reason I could find to explain my predicament. If I’m honest, I can still be prone to doing that. But when I sit down and really examine whatever drama, crisis, or problem I am facing, I can usually trace it back to a cause. What is happening today is the effect of something that came before.
Throw a stone into a still pond and the ripples spread outwards. Our actions are much the same. Everything we do, and sometimes everything we fail to do, creates consequences. Good, bad or indifferent those ripples eventually come back to us.
My actions, reactions, and inactions have all played a part in bringing me to where I am today. Sometimes the consequences are immediate. Sometimes they take years to show themselves. Often we convince ourselves we’ve got away with something, but the truth is we haven’t.
Every dishonest act, every corner cut, every small indiscretion that we know deep down is wrong gets added to the ledger. We tell ourselves it’s only a little thing, that nobody was hurt, that it doesn’t really matter. But those little things accumulate. One becomes ten, ten become a hundred, and eventually the weight of them becomes impossible to ignore, and brings us to our knees begging for forgiveness, and for the pain and suffering we are experiencing, to stop.
I’m not talking about karma in some mystical sense, although personally I do believe in Karmic law. I’m talking about cause and effect.
Recently I watched an interview with a man who had spent most of his life as a hardened criminal. By society’s standards, he appeared successful. He had the money, the cars, the big house, the expensive holidays, and the trophy girlfriend. Looking from the outside in, many people would have thought he was winning.
But behind the scenes he was living a nightmare.
He slept with a gun under his pillow. He lived in fear of rivals attacking him. He worried constantly about the police kicking his door in. He had seen friends murdered and others seriously injured. He had been the target of a number of shootings himself. His blood pressure was through the roof. He was taking medication to deal with stress and anxiety. He had already spent time in prison.
Eventually the inevitable happened. He was arrested for a serious offence and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. He lost the houses, the cars, the girlfriend, the money and, most importantly, his freedom.
Prison gave him something he had never really had before: time to think and reflect.
For years he believed he was beating the system. Only when everything was stripped away could he see the chaos he had been living in. The punishment didn’t begin when the prison doors closed behind him. The punishment had been there for years in the form of fear, stress, paranoia, poor health, and never being able to enjoy what he had.
That is what I mean when I talk about karma.
Often it isn’t until life smacks us square in the face and stops us in our tracks that we are forced to look honestly at ourselves. We are forced to ask difficult questions. We are forced to confront truths we have spent years avoiding.
There is no such thing as a free meal.
I look at social media and see people preaching a toxic version of what it means to be a man. I see people showing off wealth, chasing status, disrespecting others, and believing they are somehow winning at life. What I also see is the debt they are accumulating.
Money gained at any cost will not bring peace. Neither will status, attention, or admiration built on shaky foundations.
Real success is being able to sleep peacefully at night.
Real success is having your health.
Real success is being able to look at yourself honestly in the mirror.
And real freedom comes when you stop blaming the world and start taking responsibility for the person staring back at you.
© S Scott 2026
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lessons-Learned-Without-School-book/dp/2072092485
