I consider myself to be the kind of person who can quite easily imagine myself in someone else’s place. I don’t know if I’m actually any better at it than the average person, but judging by the comment sections on social media and the conversations I’ve had with other people, I really struggle to get angry at strangers like many others do, even for things that anger is an appropriate reaction to.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that I don’t condemn their behavior, but that it doesn’t provoke a particularly negative emotional reaction from me. I observe the world from a distance, and when I see someone acting differently, I generally can come up with a charitable story about why they act that way. While it doesn’t usually justify the behavior, it at least helps me imagine why they’re like that and reminds me that if I were in their shoes, I’d likely do the same thing.
This applies to cheating, violence, racism… Name a bad behavior, and I can come up with a story about what a person might be telling themselves to justify it. However, littering is something I simply cannot comprehend. I cannot wrap my mind around what a person is thinking when they’re throwing trash on the ground for someone else to pick up. If it’s something “minor” like a cigarette butt, then okay, I can somewhat understand, but tossing your McDonald’s takeout bag onto the side of the road is completely psychopathic behavior to me. I don’t think even the worst people in the world think of themselves as “bad” because they rationalize their behavior somehow. But if you throw trash into nature, you must know you’re being a massive jerk.
Tl;dr: I want to hear the best justification for littering.
The McDonalds stuff is made out of paper, the rain will dissolve it quickly and then it rotts within weeks and is gone. Bam!
I’ve noticed communities with less litter have more public trash cans.
Equal parts laziness, self-centeredness, indifference, and a lack of object permanence. Once they don’t see it anymore it ceases to exist, and since littering is faster once it ceases existing for them, it’s somebody else’s problem.
“Why do I give a shit? It isn’t mine.”
Personally, I think a lot of the behavior you mention is tied to a lack of ownership/personal investment in their community.
Unpopular opinion time: I think a year or so of mandatory service after high school would be beneficial for most people in this regard. Working for pretty much any non-religous social organization would be work and bring people closer to the place that they live and increase empathy for those who are worse off than they are.
I think it’s basically people just thinking “I want to get rid of this” and just drop/throw trash. Then if forced to think about it they’ll just rationalise it with “It’ll degrade over time” or “It’s not that big of a deal” or “I’m creating jobs for cleaners”
First, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, I think you should be just a tad bit MORE judgemental. Making excuses for people’s bad behavior is a bit like good people doing nothing and allowing evil to take over. You’re passively condoning the activity.
Second, the acceptable amount of littering is zero, not a cigarette butt is ok. I dropped my car off to be repaired and walked to work from there. You know what I saw along my walk. Thousands of cigarette butts. You don’t really see them from a car, but you sure see them on foot.
Third, I’m pretty sure this behavior is just trash humans. There are very few, if any, justifiable reasons not to hang on to your trash until you get to a trash can. This is my humble opinion.
I didn’t think they were accepting cigarette butts but understanding those litterers. Cigarette butts are tiny and disappear after just a couple steps. They’re “no big deal”. Those things rolled have no concept how long they last nor how they add up.
When I was a smoker, I’d roll the cherry off my cigarettes and carry the butt until I found a trashcan.
People who throw trash on the ground are some of the most thoughtless and selfish pieces of shit in this world. They think that because other people get away with “bigger” or more noticeable wrongdoing, this little thing that they’re doing isn’t such a big deal. That’s it. “It’s not like I committed a murder, gaw!” Fuck you. You made the world worse for everyone else because you couldn’t be bothered to be inconvenienced a little bit. At least a thief has the motivation of profiting from their crime. You just fucked shit up because there wasn’t anyone there to stop you. Assholes.
I don’t believe in free will or the self. To me, there’s effectively no-one for me to be judgemental of. Wether it be littering, racism or violence, these people didn’t choose to act this way, they just do and couldn’t have done otherwise. If I was them, I’d be doing the exact same thing.
I’m just as non-accepting of their behaviour as everybody else. In my case there’s just little to none negative emotions involved in it. Me getting angry about someone littering, to me, is the same as getting angry at the weather.
And yes, I agree. If I were a smoker I wouldn’t want to throw cigarette butts in the ground either for the same reason you just mentioned. My point was that I have theory of mind for such people. I can imagine how someone could naively imagine there’s no harm to it. This just no longer holds true when we’re talking about trash that’s bigger; I can’t imagine what they could be thinking.
Removed by mod
You misunderstand what he’s saying. It’s a very fundamental biology/physiology/brain chemistry, etc. idea that takes some time to understand, if you should so desire. Technically, in the most absolutely biological sense, there is a valid position that states there is no free will. That the precise pattern of the billions or trillions of synaptic connections in the brain form a distinct recipe for a specific behavior in any given scenario.
That being said, despite that it may be valid in one sense, it is just as invalid from the point of view that it is a very simplistic and also arguably not completely informed view. For the most part, therefore, arguing there’s no such thing as free will really is a vapid position, as it eliminates any and all concept of responsibility, of penalty, of society having a framework within which to coexist, and it also stops any discussion in its tracks. I understand the point of view but I find it useless.
I have informally studied this subject for years, and minored in developmental psych, and I’m on the spectrum and human cognition is one of my special interests.
It’s all predicated on a bullshit misinterpreted experiment that has blown out of proportion because ‘publish or die’ is the only law of the land.
In Libet’s experiments he either was unaware of, or actively chose to ignore the existence of visual saccades when interpreting his results, and no one has had the balls to call him out on it because so many fuckdamn academic careers hinge on this being a tenable field of study, which it isn’t.
Your condescension has sent my IED absolutely through the roof and I am very thankful for my own continuing freedom that we were not in the same room as I would have had some well thought out and egregiously unkind things to say about your parentage and education.
The fact that the self exists is self evident, and the fact that I am capable of writing this to you is literal proof. The odds of randomly colliding atoms eventually producing a machine that can lie to itself about being free willed is greater than the number of estimated atoms in the known universe, let alone this tiny speck orbiting a tiny ember dancing in a rather obscure arm of just one of ten trillion galaxies.
NOTE: I am not saying the ‘self’ is a mystical eternal force that exists beyond our death, I’m just saying that every single scholarly work I have seen trying to disprove the self has been some of the most ridiculous navel gazing I have ever seen and I used to be an alt.philosophy usenet user.
I dunno how you felt condescended to; whatever demons you have triggering you, I can sympathize, but rest assured that was never my intention. In fact, I worried I was mangling it and not expressing my thoughts clearly.
I hope you sort out whatever made you so livid over what was at worst a poorly articulated explanation of something that is hardly meaningful enough to bother with. As I said, I find it without utility so who really cares.
Hoping you feel better. Oh, for the record, that sentence was condescension :-)
Do I have to break out the crayons for you?
Dr. Benjamin Libet in the 80s did a series of tests on human cognition, involving people reporting when a certain configuration of a clock face occurred. This experiment is literally the watershed moment when psychologists and neurologists misinterpreted the results to be that “Humans actually act before they consciously choose to act” which is what started this entire faddish exploration of a nonexistent corner of the neurology and psychology fields.
Saccades are moments when your brain fills in your visual experience with false and blending data, usually during rapid eye movement. This is why sometimes when you look at a clock the second hand may seem to tick backwards one tick. It is your brain filling in the places where the movement of your eyes or other interruptions (like the hole in your vision your optic nerve makes but you almost never experience).
All of Libet’s ‘surprising’ findings are more reasonably and experimentally explained by saccades during the measurement steps than the explanation being that we are all deterministic self-modifying chemical cascades that can make more of ourselves and bear the illusion of selfhood. This concern was brought up before he published but never again and never since.
The reason why it makes me SO BLINDINGLY INFURIATED is that YOU ARE RIGHT NOW EXPERIENCING THE PROOF OF YOUR SENSE OF SELF’S EXISTENCE!
But because so many self-satisfied academics and rottube ‘surprising facts’ content creator’s careers now depend on that avenue of research being a valid path of study, all based on a near-as-self-disproving-interpretation as could possibly exist, no serious criticism of his methodology or interpretations is allowed in ANY level, academic, layman, or even just a fucking chat over a beer.
And it’s always some knowlessman making calming gestures while having zero basis of understanding other than that it’s the new edgy topic that comes in to quell discussions and both sidesism the whole thread to irrelevance.
Congrats for doing your job, I guess.
150 years from now when we really start to get a firm grasp on consciousness, the academics of that future (if we survive) will consider the denial of consciousness as a curious and misguided fad that led so many bright minds astray.
Your condescension has sent my IED absolutely through the roof
Do I have to break out the crayons for you?
You understand condescension, and yet you still do it yourself.
Jesus, dude, you’re blowing everything I said way out of proportion and also completely missing my point.
I think you just wanted to give someone a lecture while also grinding an axe or two. Have at it, enjoy.
You’ve already completely disregarded what I was talking about and have gone on to just unload whatever crap you’ve been wanting to.
Glad you got the opportunity to vent. I am way beyond done with this because it has never been a conversation. Feel free to keep going, I’m sure some readers will find it entertaining.
P.S. I think you’d benefit from therapy.
You can stop punching him, you made your point. 🙂
Yeah I don’t have a clue what triggered him but now that I look again at his username, I think he acknowledges he’s just always angry? I don’t know. All I was doing was trying to be helpful but as the saying goes “no good deed goes unpunished.”
It’s medical, windowlicker.
Get bent in multidimensional ways and write a book about it.
I bet it’s a bestseller.
I’m pretty much the same way. You gotta remember though that anger is not a negative emotion. An irrational amount of an emotion is a negative emotion.
An emotion is just a driving force of your behavior. “Angry” is mostly there for us to take action about unacceptable situations. Thus getting angry at the weather doesn’t make sense, since you can’t change it.
However, someone littering is in a limited way under your control. Like you said in another comment, you can confront them and use your power for them to pick up after themselves. Saying you’re not getting angry/irritated at all is the equivalent of not doing anything about it to most people. And I do think you’re at least getting irritated (which is a low form of anger) at people littering, which is why you do something about it or post this topic.
It seems to me a bit that you see any kind of anger, including being irritated, as bad, and thus show no sign of it/deny it even though you have it.
It’s obviously a negative feeling in my view. It can be used as motivation for changing things to the better but I can’t see it as anything else as negative. It’s not a pleasant feeling.
Ofcourse I’m not immune to it myself either but being such a strong emotion it’s nearly impossible to not notice and thus it acts as a kind of mindfulness alarm. When I catch myself getting angry at something I immediately realize how that is in conflict with how I see the world and then the anger basically dissapears. It’s kind of like waking up at the morning and being irritated that it’s raining outside but then at the same moment realizing that I can’t change the weather and I’ll rather just be wet than wet and angry. It’s the so called second arrow.
Unlike weather I can affect other people however, and I do. No disagreement there. I simply just don’t see the need to feel anger while doing so. It’s done and can’t be undone. They couldn’t have done otherwise so no need to get angry and pretend as if they could have. My intention is to encourage them to not act that way in the future.
I guess it depends on how much trouble you have with too much anger. Very often, anger is counterproductive, not only for yourself, but for actually effecting the change in others you desire.
In that case, it’s often good to “overcorrect” and rather try to feel less anger than appropriate, so that your troubles get reduced.
However, I still think it’s an overreaction and an appropriate amount of anger at the appropriate things is healthy, as in the end it’s actually a conflict within yourself to have less anger than appropriate - you’re forcing yourself to spend more energy suppressing/letting go of the anger, and then having less energy to effect the change you desire.
Think of litterers like poorly trained dogs taking a shit on your sidewalk. They did it because they had to do it somewhere, and they’re not trained enough to understand that there are right places and wrong places.
do you mean as opposed to grass. Not sure how much dogs are trained to use grass. I mean I do bring them there so maybe they pick up on that and true if for some reason they seem to be starting before the grass I will pull them over but honestly I think they prefer the grass or other earthen areas over concrete. Basically not sure if that behavior is trained so much as instinct but I suppose it could be a bit of both. much training is about reinforcing behavior dogs do to begin with so I guess you could say that about all of it. sorry sorta ruminating this through my head as I type.
To the many comments, and my concerns to the tolerance of certain things, I would like to add that many people cannot efficiently nor autonomously handle (most or some of) their own frustrations and decide to vent them out in many ways, like throwing them to others, like when a simple cashier burdens a customer’s frustration for a (fair or unfair) complain, and littering is another way to do it, screwing “the systemic unfair world” or just looking to impact it in some way or another if they cannot handle a strong feeling of irrelevance. Consciously or not, is a coping mechanism that some people will use, while sometimes is something normalised to the point to be unconscious (people threshold for or concept of cleanness varies a lot).
I confronted someone for littering and with a completely sincere face they said they’re creating jobs for the people cleaning the streets 💫 so does that mean murderers are creating jobs for homicide detectives?
Creating a need is not the same as creating a job.
Same thing when I confronted someone about it.
It’s like people who dont return their shopping carts because they think they’re creating work.
No, you’re compounding the amount of work someone else needs to do within a set time.
They dont get paid more because you’re lazy.
Except littering is worse.
I once convinced one of my aunts that leaving your cart out gives companies another excuse to raise prices again
(not that I actually think that’s true; i just didn’t want to feel like an butthole for leaving our cart out)
“I never learned or thought about how long my trash will actually insist on existing and polluting my environment. I’m completely ignorant of how incredibly slowly plastic decomposes and how toxic it is for plastic to leach into the lowest parts of the food chain and concentrate on its way up.”
“AFAIK, because the earth will take care of it somehow - everything turns into dirt when you leave it in the dirt long enough, right?”
“I’m just sooo ignorant, plastic will just break back up into little plastic fibers and the ocean can recycle it for us, like tree bark or w/e, right?”
That’s my best, but still invalid, justification. What do I win ::: spoiler spoiler /sarcasm (I hope this spoiler works bc it’s not working on boost) :::
spoiler
Tik tiki tock
::: the spoiler isn’t spoilering, no.
:::
justifying anything easy for someone who thinks the whole world revolves around them.
“Why did you do <anti social / bad thing>?”
“cause fuck you i don’t care”
There’s no justification, it’s part of a broken culture.
As a Czech citizen living in a city, I see it happening all around me. By far not for everyone, but for a lot of people treating trash properly is considered a fool’s errand, virtual signalling, try-hard, you name it. This toxicity is unfortunately too common in the culture, and lot of people (including me) are just afraid or tired of being seen as a try-hard. It’s especially “awkward” to clean up.
Obvious littering is one thing but I recon most of the trash floating around is due to “practical littering”, where people, if trash cans are full, will just “neatly” place their beloved trash next to the can, kiss it goodbye and walk around as if wind does not exist. I’m probably too cynical but sometimes I imagine the same people going judgemental when they see trash caught up in bushes.
As for cigarette butts, that’s just dumb. I don’t think I’ve seen someone toss something like a plastic bottle or a bag on the ground, just like that, more than 5 times in my life, but with cigarette butts I see them all the time – most often just before they jump on a tram or a bus. (I’m strongly against violence and bullying, but rationality aside, to be honest, there’s a part of me that is wishing they had to pick it up and chew it.)
(Goddamn, about 2 weeks ago, someone must have left some balls of yarn outside, next to a trashcan, on straight street. I was walking to grocery shop and some kind of thread was unrolled along the pavement for, i kid you not, like 150m. It was bizarre. Could have been some serious TikTok/YTShorts material if someone wanted to make a “goody PSA”.)
Why do people litter? For convenience. No story, justification, or self-reflection needed.
tl;dr I really don’t get it either.
I really don’t understand how people can do it. I moved to a developing nation in the Caribbean. Everyone’s livelihood is connected to nature here. Reefs, especially. Yet every local I have met will casually toss their garbage. I went to a festival on the beach and most of the locals were burying their trash in the sand just enough to keep it from blowing away in the moment. Some don’t even bother with that pretense. There were trash cans in easy strolling distance, every 50 feet.
The roads and waterways are stuffed with garbage here. I live on a canal that connects to the sea, and have watched tour guides and fishing expeditions tossing plastic bottles, polystyrene food containers and plastic bags overboard daily for two years. These are the same people protesting dredging their flats and cayes near the reef, but inexplicably and deliberately ignorant of their own impact.
Also interesting to observe is the speed at which the nation transitioned from class and aluminum drink containers to plastics. Mt first visit here was just three years ago, and most drinks were in bottles that were clearly recycled. Laser etch marks, rubbing from other bottles, etc. Now its all plastic. There’s a national ban on single use plastics, but it isn’t enforced, and it all ends up in the water and in the ground.
When I first witnessed the ghastly indifference of everyone here regarding proper disposal of garbage, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was like watching a bunch of five year-old kids, the way they shamelessly toss their trash to the wind.
Cigarette butts really anger me. It’s a sign of entitlement that I hate. The person knows it’s smelly and disgusting, so they get it as far away from their person or car without a second thought.
I can be judgemental about it because I smoked for over 20 years. I kept a ziplock bag on me (kind of like you would for dog poop when walking your dog) and would keep em in there until I could find a trash can. The ashtray in my car was also used instead of throwing them out the window.
Now that I’ve quit the habit, I notice it even more. It’s awful. My father and mother in law throw their butts on our lawn literally every time they come over, even though they are fully aware that we don’t smoke. When I put a coffee can on the front porch and let them know that’s where they should throw them, they looked at ME like I was the rude one.
Judge em hard. Cigarette smokers have very little space for other people in their world.
Yeah I confronted a friend for throwing one onto my lawn and they didn’t seem to get why it was such a big deal for me. He clearly thinks nothing of it. In the army we were always told to bury them. It’s not a perfect solution either but so much better than just tossing it.
