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)
Creating a need is not the same as creating a job.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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”
Why do people litter? For convenience. No story, justification, or self-reflection needed.
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”
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).
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.
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.
Common reasons for littering are:
- unavailability of trash cans (in a convenient distance)
- inability to pay for trash disposal (this includes transport of heavy items or a large quantity of)
- creation of jobs associated with trash removal (often including arguments that tax payers fund those jobs and as a taxpayer it’s their right to litter)
Exaggerated are these issues by low social education fueling short sightedness (“out of view out of mind”). So people lacking the understanding that somebody has to pay for removal of that waste.
I’ve noticed communities with less litter have more public trash cans.
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.
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.
“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.
:::
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).
