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.
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?
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)
Why do people litter? For convenience. No story, justification, or self-reflection needed.
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 laziness first and foremost. It is sometimes influenced by logistics, such as no trash recepticals being available. But that’s still zero excuse, really.
The only time littering might be in any way shape or form understandable, it’d actually probably be called illegal dumping. If you’re so poor you can’t afford trash removal, you might end up resorting to illegal dumping. But again, much different than petty littering.
no trash recepticals being available
This is somewhat understandable if it’s something dirty like a meat packaging dripping with marinade that you don’t want to put in your bag but it almost never is. It’s a bottle, candy wrappings, juice container, chip bag etc. It was assumeably filled with something when they brought it in but they somehow can’t take it back now that it’s empty and thus lighter and packs into smaller space. This doesn’t make any sense to me.
It’s lazyness, most likely combined by the person just not caring about their environment (be it their surroundings, incluidng other people who have to live with the litter around them, or the environment). Most often than not it’s less intelligent people or people who don’t know better (like kids).
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.
I’ve noticed communities with less litter have more public trash cans.
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.
“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) :::
Story: I was on a bus once, another passenger was a guy with a big McD Coke. We got off at the same station. Here, each station has a trash can.
So this guy walks right by the trash can and drops his fucking coke right next to it. He could have extended his arm like 10 cm more, and the coke would have gone into the trash can. But he chose to drop it on the floor.
This was years ago, and I think this day broke my faith in humanity a little.
I wonder if it would help to think back to the first time you littered? When I was 5 or 6, I remember eating a candy and not wanting the wrapper any more. It had to be someone else who saw what I did and pointed out that it isn’t good if we all did this, because then the playground would be all full of trash and we couldn’t play there. I was like, “Oh, I get it.” But if someone hadn’t explained it to me, I think the behavior could have innocently continued for quite some time. I grew up in a very rural place (northern Canada).
People - everyone, including you and me - don’t think before most of their acts. And a lot of bad habits boils down to conditioning or lack of.
That’s likely the case for littering: they do it without thinking, justification, or reasoning. “I got some trash, I don’t want it, so I throw it on the ground.”
I choose to believe it’s mostly accidental. Either it fell out of a trashcan while the truck was doing pick ups or sucked out of a car window before the driver could catch it. Or any other number of circumstances that probably happened to us in one point it time.
Obviously that’s not always the case but there’s no point in my getting angry at imaginary people about it.
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’ve always wondered if it’s those over clean types. People whose always obsessed with cleaning. They don’t want to dirty their own environment with trash so it all goes out immediately
“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.
