As the year comes to a close and the air grows crisp and cool, I want to take a moment this month of Thanksgiving to thank you, my students, readers, and friends, for being here, for reading, reflecting, and growing alongside me. Your support and thoughtful engagement mean more than words can express. Each month’s episode is a shared journey of awareness and discovery, and I’m deeply grateful to have you all walking this path with me. Now, let’s get into “The Blame Game.”
The Blame Game
The blame game might very well be humanity’s favorite pastime. It’s passed down quietly, generation to generation, with each player pretending they’ve invented it. Most of us engage in it daily, almost instinctively, both at work and during our free time. We point, accuse, defend, and excuse. We sculpt stories that make us the heroes of our own hardships. It’s a subtle art, really, the mind’s way of protecting the ego from the embarrassment of being wrong, the pain of being seen, or the terror of being truly responsible.
We sometimes play the blame game like poker, bluffing our way through guilt and grievance, hiding our mistakes behind mirrors and masks. And sometimes we play it like chess, carefully calculating counter-moves, defending our dignity with pawns of pride, bishops of justification, and noble knights of honour. We spend our lives perfecting it, learning how to shift responsibility, redirect attention, and stay innocent enough to sleep at night. I used to play that version too, but I found it exhausting, with too many moving parts, too many excuses, and not enough action.
It’s All My Fault
Now, I play it differently. I blame myself for everything. It saves time and keeps me from wandering the wilderness looking for someone else to crucify for my confusion and lack of confidence. If a storm comes, I must have whispered something unwise to the wind. If I trip, I clearly forgot to look where I was going. Coffee’s cold, it’s because I was too busy thinking to drink it while it was warm. I no longer waste energy hunting for culprits or scapegoats. I’ve fired the jury and retired the judge. The verdict is always the same. It was me. When the coffee spills, the computer crashes, or the car won’t start, I nod, smile, and say, “My fault.” There’s something oddly comforting about taking the whole load. It’s efficient, almost elegant, like folding chaos neatly into a single suitcase and then walking away.
So, I play the blame game, but I play to lose, because when I fail, I stop defending myself, and that’s when the truth starts talking. The bottom line is that no one is guilty, and there’s no one to blame, including me. If I am aware of this, then my awareness ends the blame game. The man who made guilt into art and confession into catharsis, Dostoevsky, would have adored such absurdity. Let’s explore Blame Game theory with an existential triangle, traveling from confession to acceptance, and into action to find responsibility.
A Sculptor of Circumstance
Blame is a subtle kind of sorcery. Direct it outward, and it curses, but when directed inward, it cleanses. You can cast your blame like spells, hoping to change the world, avoiding the work of changing yourself. But when you take the blame, you take back your power. You stop being the victim of circumstances and become the sculptor of them.
When I accepted that my bad moods, missed opportunities, and any messes I might find myself entangled in were my fault, I realized something surprising. I didn’t feel overwhelmed. I felt empowered. Like a Dostoevskian character who confesses to a crime he didn’t commit. Not because he’s guilty, but because he grasps the essence of guilt itself, and the burden of being human and self-aware. Follow me for a deliciously dark, Dostoevskian deep dive into the dungeon of self-responsibility, lit by flickering candles of irony and, as always, an abundance of alliteration.
Dostoevsky: The Confessional Mirror
Fyodor Dostoevsky understood the dark basement of the human soul better than anyone. His characters are constantly wrestling with guilt, wrestling with God, and ultimately wrestling with themselves, bleeding through their words, writhing in moral mirrors until they find redemption in reflection. They understand what many modern minds have forgotten: that awareness, however painful, is the first step toward freedom”.
“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.“
To blame oneself, in Dostoevsky’s world, isn’t masochism but the first step toward mercy. His characters suffer their way toward sight. In Crime and Punishment, when Raskolnikov also kills Lizaveta Ivanovna (the old pawnbroker’s sister) upon her witnessing the murder, this directly betrays Raskolnikov’s moral justification of killing the old pawnbroker for the greater good. He kills to prove his freedom, only to discover that the real prison isn’t the Siberian one but the one he built inside his conscience.
Play the Blame Game the Dostoevskian Way
Dostoevsky doesn’t sugarcoat sin or sanctify suffering. He shows that confession clears the fog. When we stop explaining ourselves, when we stop editing our motives, we start to see the machinery of the mind and the tangled wires of pride, fear, and longing that drive our decisions.
When I play the blame game Dostoevsky’s way, I turn the light inward. I admit my contradictions, my cowardice, my cleverness. I own the whole chaotic choir of my inner world. Only by acknowledging the noise can I begin to hear the music beneath.
Blame, then, is not the end of the story. It’s the opening of the door. Dostoevsky invites us inside to look at our darkness not with despair, but with depth. He reminds us that the person we fear to face is the person we’re dying to meet. When I stop excusing myself, I stop fragmenting myself, and I become whole. Not perfect, but free, real, and present.
Camus: The Absurd Smile
In a fit of philosophical fatigue, let’s now turn to Albert Camus, the patron saint of absurdity. Camus said life is absurd because we demand sense from a senseless world. We want answers, justice, explanations, and the universe shrugs. If Dostoevsky is the confessor, Camus is the comedian. He stands beneath an indifferent sky and laughs. Camus observed that life has no built-in meaning, yet the human heart continues to search for it. Absurdity lies in the collision between our hunger for purpose and the universe’s silence. And yet, instead of despairing, he smiles.
Reading The Myth of Sisyphus, I could see myself, hands on the boulder, shoving it up the hill of self-improvement, self-justification, self-blame. And every time it rolled back down, I’d curse myself for not being better, wiser, faster. Then I heard Camus whisper from the page:
“We must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Putting the Fun in Funny
Happy? With this?
Yes. Happy performing an endless, absurd, and meaningless task forever. A life of eternally pushing a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down again. Because once Sisyphus accepts the absurdity of his fate and stops expecting the mountain to change, the rock to stay, or the gods to care, he’s free.
That’s when I laughed out loud. Not a bitter kind of laugh but a bright, belly-deep kind that bubbles up when you finally see the joke. There’s no one to blame. Not the world, not the weather, not even myself. The game was rigged from the start, and there was never a referee, never a rulebook, never a reason.
Shoulder Your Bolder
Camus isn’t mocking us, but liberating us, telling us to stop waiting for meaning to arrive and start dancing in the absurdity that we already see. When I look through Camus’s lens, the blame game turns into a kind of cosmic comedy. What does it matter who’s to blame when life itself refuses to play fair?
Joking aside, when you embrace the absurd, blame dissolves. You stop keeping score and stop demanding that life make sense before you start living it. You shoulder your boulder and hum a tune on the way up. Because in that moment, the mountain is yours. The climb is yours. The laughter is yours. And that’s how I play the blame game now, not with guilt or grievance, but with a grin. The rules are simple: whoever’s fault it is, it doesn’t matter. The game itself is the joke, and there’s no punchline, but I’m in on it.
Accepting Meaningless Miracles
Camus softens the sting of self-blame by showing that freedom begins not with forgiveness, but with acceptance. When I stop fighting the absurdity of existence, I start flowing with it. The rock is heavy, yes, but the view from the mountain is magnificent. The point is that the universe owes me nothing, yet it gives me everything: my breath, these thoughts, and the chance to choose actions over reactions.
The rules are unwritten, the referee is invisible, and the game goes on whether I approve or not. So I stop taking myself so seriously, stop demanding reasons, and start enjoying the riddle. I let go of the illusion that understanding will save me, and I learn to live as if each moment were both meaningless and miraculous, because that is what’s real.
Sartre: The Author’s Chair
We’ll round out our existential triangle with the clear, cold, and uncompromising French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre. If Dostoevsky teaches us to confess and Camus to accept, Sartre teaches us to act. He declares that there is no God, no cosmic author, no divine editor cleaning up our drafts. We are alone with our choices, and therefore utterly responsible for them.
“Man is condemned to be free.”
At first, that sounds harsh, freedom as a sentence, not a gift. But Sartre meant it as liberation. Once we realize that no one is pulling the strings, we can stop pretending to be puppets. We are the playwrights of our own play. Every thought, every gesture, every silence is an act of authorship. Even doing nothing is a kind of writing. That blank page still bears your name.
To blame yourself through Sartre’s lens is to see that you are always choosing, even when you claim not to be. You are choosing your attitude, your reaction, your interpretation. You are not what happens to you but what you make of it. That is a frightening thought that strips away every excuse. But it’s also the most empowering idea in philosophy. Because if you are the author, you can revise. Sartre invites us to sit in the author’s chair of our own existence. To write consciously, to live deliberately, to sign our name beneath each moment as if it were a line in a living poem.
Bad Faith: The Great Escape
But Sartre knew how slippery the mind can be. He called it bad faith. That subtle self-deception where we pretend we have no choice, even though we do. We say, “I had to,” or “It’s just the way I am,” or “That’s life.” These phrases are smoke screens, little linguistic escapes from responsibility. We perform roles, adopt labels, and hide behind circumstances because freedom is too heavy to hold.
I catch myself there often, saying, “I didn’t mean to,” when I did. Or I say, “It just happened,” when I let it. Bad faith is the ego’s favorite trick, turning freedom into fate and responsibility into routine. But awareness catches it. Awareness says, “No, you chose this.” And in that moment, I wake up, accept the blame, and move forward. I may not control the storm, but I can control my sail. I can steer through chaos instead of drifting in complaint. Blame, when examined closely, becomes a choice. And choice is the birthplace of authenticity.
Awareness: Blame becomes a Bridge
The deeper I go into this blame game, the less it feels like blame and more like an awakening. At first, I blamed myself out of impatience. It was simply faster than arguing. Then I began to see it as practice and an exercise in awareness. Now, it feels like prayer, A humble acknowledgment that everything in my life is happening through me, not to me.
When I stop looking for someone to fault, I start looking for something to learn. The question shifts from “Who’s wrong?” to “What’s real?” Blame becomes a bridge between ignorance and insight. It’s the moment I stop defending my limitations and begin to understand them.
An Existential Orchestra
Dostoevsky shows me the courage to confess — to face the darkness within without flinching, to look into the mirror of my own contradictions and admit that I am both saint and sinner. His characters tremble on the edge of guilt and redemption, reminding me that honesty with oneself is the first act of freedom.
Camus shows me the courage to laugh — to smile in the face of the absurd, to find lightness even in meaninglessness. His laughter isn’t born of mockery, but of rebellion; it’s the soul’s refusal to be crushed by the weight of a silent universe. In acceptance, there is joy. In surrender, there is strength.
Sartre shows me the courage to choose — to act without excuse, knowing that every decision defines me anew. His philosophy strips away the illusions of fate or external authority, leaving only the raw freedom of human will. To choose is to create; to act is to affirm existence.
Together, they form an existential orchestra, each philosopher playing a distinct yet harmonious line in the symphony of awareness. Dostoevsky provides the confession — the minor key of introspection. Camus offers acceptance—the bright, melodic, almost cosmic resilience of being. Sartre drives the movement toward action — the rhythm of responsibility.
Three instruments of awareness playing the same melody in different keys: Confession. Acceptance. Action.
When they blend, the harmony becomes something greater — the music of responsibility, the song of a soul awake to its own freedom.
Responsibility: The Freedom Within
Responsibility sounds heavy, but it’s the lightest thing in the world once you stop resisting it. To say “I am responsible” is to reclaim reality. It means I am not a puppet of circumstance, not a victim of history, not a byproduct of others’ behavior. I am an active participant in the unfolding of my own experience.
When I take responsibility, I stop reacting and start responding. When I stop reacting, I start reflecting. When I reflect, I begin to see clearly. This clarity is quiet. It doesn’t boast or beg. It simply acts, naturally, directly, and honestly. Sartre would call that authenticity. Dostoevsky might call it repentance. Camus might call it rebellion. Let us call it awareness, the state in which the inner and outer worlds finally meet.
The Joy of Responsibility
There’s a kind of joy hidden inside responsibility. Not the joy of success, but the pleasure of sincerity, and the peace of knowing you’re living your truth, moment by moment. When I say “I am to blame,” what I really mean is “I am not blaming anyone else.” That awakening transforms blame into being. I stop judging myself by results and start observing myself in the process. Every mistake becomes a lesson, every failure a form of feedback from the universe.
To live this way is to play jazz with existence, improvising meaning in real time, letting awareness lead the rhythm. I listen, respond, and adjust. I don’t cling to the chart, I trust the sound. It’s not perfection I’m after. Its presence. And maybe that’s the secret Sartre, Camus, and Dostoevsky were each circling in their own way. Once you accept responsibility for everything, you stop blaming anyone — especially yourself. You realize there’s nothing to forgive, only things to understand.
Blame into Balance
I won’t pretend it’s pleasant. Self-blame can be painful, melting the masks of ego and pride until only sincerity remains. But perhaps that’s the point. The fire of self-awareness doesn’t destroy, but it refines. It burns blame into balance, shame into strength, guilt into growth.
So, let’s play the blame game with gusto, and let’s play to lose. Because in losing, we win back ourselves. When we surrender the need to be right, we become real. When we stop pointing fingers, we find open hands. And when we accept the world as our own reflection, every conflict, every failure, every fear, we stop being at war with it. Then by letting go of the need to be right, we discover our authentic selves. When we stop blaming others, we open ourselves up to new possibilities.
The Quiet Conductor
Once we stop blaming and start listening, the noise of accusation fades, and in the hush that follows, something softer speaks. A steady tone beneath the turbulence reveals the inner musician — the quiet conductor — calling us back to balance.
Mastery lives not in control, but in consciousness, not in the shouting match of blame, but in the silent harmony of awareness. So, play the blame game, but only long enough to remember it was never a game at all, merely a rehearsal for responsibility, a lesson in listening, and a prelude to inner peace.
