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Bewildered

In my day-to-day life, I have to deal with a lot of people who are completely, unabashedly OK with others doing things for them. Often these people will take credit for it, but for the most part, they're simply happy to accept the responsibility of a task being completed without them putting forth any effort.

For quite some time now, this behavior has confused and angered me. Some of the people guilty of these inactions are my age or older, while many are half, maybe closer to one-third of my age. The thing that always strikes me is their ambivalence. I've chalked much of it up to my favorite psychological net, cognitive dissonance. I truly believe that most people simply accept someone else will do something and while they know they need to help, once it's complete, they take solace in knowing that the job was completed, with or without them. That all changed yesterday.

Yesterday, and I'll leave out the actual task, because the simplicity, but also the necessity of the task, may actually distract from my point, I realized I may actually be wrong. During the day, I did something that a group is responsible for daily. While I cannot claim to be the only one who performs this task, it falls on me roughly ninety percent of the time. At one point, it was more like ninety-seven, and yes, I know this because I counted. Yesterday, like most days, I had the task left for me, and I did it. Later in the day, out of nowhere, and to much shock, I was thanked for the task. Something that has only happened, two, maybe three times out of well over 200 times. The gratitude was followed up with an explanation that left me, not only amazed, but bewildered. During the course of the brief explanation, it was made quite obvious that the apologist sincerely believed that he was normally the one to do this task. A task, he's done, ten, maybe fifteen times in the past twenty months. To compound my confusion was another person who backed this statement up, who has performed this task less than three times that I know of in the same time period. I was taken aback. The shock of one person's delusions is one thing, but to have two people act in complete accordance with one another, regarding something neither actually does felt surreal.

I've had some time to think about this and now I am going over some other instances in my recent life and wondering if this is the norm. If one's repetitive actions can actually facilitate another person's mind into believing they are responsible for a task the rarely ever attempt, being completed. It now has me wondering if mental capacity or maybe a disability allows others to fully believe they are responsible for things simply because they are achieved. I'm sure this has been delved into, but I don't even know what to call it. Is it cognitive dissonance if the person truly believes that a given completed task must mean they performed it? Is it really possible, for someone with average, even close to average intelligence, to take credit for something they rarely do, and believe this without any reservations? In any other scenario, I'd believe this to be a mental illness, but the task itself is so mundane, I can't believe the human brain would process the need for a sense of achievement. Or is that the core of the issue. Are people who are more simple-minded, wired to need to accept credit, in their own minds, for those tasks which most of us view as a daily routine?

I realize this is a lot of thinking and even more words to go into something most would view as unimportant, but the human mind, and how it works, always fascinates me. Even more so, those who seem so detached from reality, without showing any outward signs of mental instability. How does one carry on daily tasks in a setting with shared responsibilities, when they believe they are responsible for things they rarely attempt, let alone achieve? It's left me scratching my head and will probably consume more thoughts than it should.

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