You Did The Right Thing, But You Shouldn't Have Had To

Someone's effort doesn't create an obligation for everyone else

“You did the right thing, but you shouldn’t have had to” is a thing I think, when someone does the right thing in a tough spot. I’ve always disliked the tendency to hold up people who are heroes, or overcome odds, or pull themselves up by their bootstraps, or selflessly fall on their swords, as if their unlikely and unusual heroism places some kind of obligation on everybody else in unenviable situations.

Maybe it’s just me. You know, fellow Catholics have always talked about how reading about the lives of the saints inspires them in their faith. Me, nothing has ever made me consider hanging up my hat as a Christian like reading about the saints. I’m supposed to love God so much that I’m willing to be grilled alive—and wisecrack about how one side of me is cooked and it’s time to rotate the spit? Maybe this Jesus stuff isn’t for me.

Again, maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s my tendency to think someone else’s heroism places some kind of expectation on me. But here’s the thing: those kinds of exceptional people, often, are quite humble. And they’re probably, often, quite aware that not everyone has the resolve they have or had. Many time it’s other people—more comfortable, fortunate people, for whom sacrifice is an abstraction—who hold up the exceptional as the expected.

What am I on about? I guess I’m thinking about how just like there’s not necessarily any virtue in suffering, there isn’t any necessary virtue in “making it” either. Some people do, some people don’t. The fact that someone somewhere bought a fixer-upper and fixed and uppered it (is that how you say it?) or that someone had 10 kids before 30 or that some guy stopped buying coffee and is now a billionaire—none of that says anything about the median person and the incentives and challenges they face. None of it says anything about society.