this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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I have never thrown trash on the ground in my life. I cannot imagine who was brought up to think that's ok.
I'm going to rant here because your comment re-ignited my rage.
My family and I have weekly dinners. I drive over there and pass through their neighborhood. They own a successful business so it's a pretty nice neighborhood with a good median of trees down the main road passing through (still a 25 MPH speed limit). And every week for several years now, there is a discarded Pepsi can in the median. Not the same can, but a new can every week. Someone drives through there, likely multiple times a week and I'm just not there to see it,, and throws a Pepsi can in roughly the same spot.
It enrages me. It's so senseless and selfish that I cannot even fathom a reason. My best justification is that they're a person who is "sticking it to the rich" by littering in a nice neighborhood, but that's being extremely generous. I am convinced it's purposeful because the consistency is staggering. A new can in the same 100 feet of road, every day.
And I know it's not the same can because if it snows, the snow obscures the cans and the poor hero picking them up can't see them, so when the snow melts there are several cans littered about.
It genuinely makes me so angry, because it's so inexplicably terrible. I just hate things I can't understand. It makes me more angry than Donald Trump because at least with Trump, on some level I get it. I may hate what he's doing but I can logically see why he's doing it and that understanding is almost calming, in a sense.
But this? Absolute nonsense. I just cannot see why someone would do this
I think Hanlon's Razor probably applies. It's likely just some person enjoying a Pepsi at the end of the day and throwing it out because they'll pile up in their car otherwise.
Laziness is something that's lauded in this day and age, they likely just don't understand that what they're doing is wrong.
I could be wrong, but most people aren't malicious.
The fact of most people not being malicious isn’t much insulation from malice. One malicious person is enough to create a can wave.
If someone wanted to be malicious (and like you're saying start a wave) something tells me that throwing a single Pepsi can out of their window periodically is one of the least effective ways to do it.
Probably not, but maybe they’re doing it to make sure that guy keeps his job.
I'm pretty sure one of my neighbors is trying to hide their after work (drive home) drinking habit from their spouse. There is a liquor store on the way into my neighborhood and I'm pretty sure they stop there, get several mini shot bottles and drink and toss them as they go on the way home. I pick them up on my walks, but I swear to god if I ever see the asshole do it I'm gonna save them up and leave them on their doorstep with a note.
See alcohol I could "get" but Pepsi? Who has a Pepsi addiction
I know someone who does. He lost all his teeth by 30. No water ever, only pepsi. Though, given the rest of his diet, he may have literally had scurvy, so it could have been that, or a combination of the two issues.
I'll admit it, though I'm not proud of it. I used to throw trash out the car window all of the time when I was in highschool (idk if I thought it was funny, or I was being cool, or just truly didn't consider it). It hurts to think about my dumbass doing that in the past, but it happened
Now I don't even throw my cigarette butts on the ground. I twist them out and put them in my pocket until I can find a proper trash can. I pick up other litter when I can and even raked an entire campsite of beer cans/trash thrown around (I was just hiking and stumbled upon it, but I couldn't leave it without doing something). So hopefully I've earned a little good-litter-karma back for all the fuckery I caused as a dumb teen
It’s amazing how complete my mind felt when I was a teenager, and then how incomplete it looks in retrospect as I realize how little consideration I gave to consequences of actions.
Like, I remember moments when friends and I ruined this or that, then had some adult say something like “somebody has to fix that now”.
I’d be like “yeah duh” like I knew this fact, but somehow it wasn’t real to me. Consequences were just a blank.
I think one of the weird things about the human mind is we have this kind of words-only knowledge and we have this fully real knowledge, and we tend to confuse the one for the other so easily and often.
“Do you know X?”
“Yes I know that”
But then it never enters into your actions because you only “know it” in words, the same way you know something like “An AU is the distance from Earth to the Sun”. It’s a perfectly comprehensible fact with no visceral reality to it.
When I was a teenager, consequences were words-only knowledge for me.
Well, besides eventual differences in cognitive ability, this probably has a lot more to do with that a lot of teenagers today aren't responsible for much at all. In smaller communities, you see the event chain much clearer. You probably know who has to fix the ruined thing. Perhaps you even have to help out yourself. To put it simply, you don't shit where you drink. This of course presupposes that the small community is a community to begin with; connections and relations between people and their environment need work, need to be maintained.
In a modern context or a larger city, you have much less of an immediate connection to the consequences of breaking, say, a streetlight. Someone else has to clean it up, someone else has to fix it, and they probably get paid for doing so anyway. And this is the typical attitude of everyone around you, this is what you learn.
But to turn this around, most of the environment around you in modern society actually has nothing to do with you. In an urban environment, not much is "yours" and you have little direct investment in anything. You're a guest in your own living space. And with this in mind, why should you care about some streetlight? Or some building you're not even allowed to enter? Or a street full of billboards for products other people make money from?
I only did it once when I was young and my uncle gave me the stare and told me to pick it up and put it in my pocket. That's really all it took to teach me it was wrong amd have never littered since, at least not intentionally.