this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
926 points (99.3% liked)
memes
10190 readers
2249 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to [email protected]
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
Sister communities
- [email protected] : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- [email protected] : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- [email protected] : Linux themed memes
- [email protected] : for those who love comic stories.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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?