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.
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.