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.
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 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”
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
“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’ve noticed communities with less litter have more public trash cans.
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).
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”
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)
The McDonalds stuff is made out of paper, the rain will dissolve it quickly and then it rotts within weeks and is gone. Bam!
Why do people litter? For convenience. No story, justification, or self-reflection needed.
Government’s job. Time for them to do some real work for once, rather than wasting the money they steal from us.
Clean it up janny (litterers are job creators), clean it up jan jan!
Obviously, don’t do this on someone’s private property, unless you don’t like them.
Edit Answered OP but people can’t handle a little role play.
They already have a shitty job, no need to make them clean dog poop, shaworma and ice-cream off the pavement too.
Yeah, that’s the broken window fallacy.
Better than some of the evil shit they spend on. Drain their funds. Civil disobedience, peaceful protest
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’M AN ADULT!
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.
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 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.
