By 
I have some unpleasant news for you: The odds that you accidentally kill another human being in the next year or so are, like, kinda high.
That’s a startling fact of this pandemic, and it’s totally true. This highlights an eternal, irrefutable reality: Whether you like it or not, you are connected to everybody else in the world.
A losing-faith-in-humanity number of people are being fucking assholes right now. They’re not keeping their distance from people, they’re not wearing masks, and they’re projecting their murderous germs all over confined spaces in the midst of a global pandemic just because they think mozzarella sticks taste better coming from TGI Friday’s microwave.
Despite my language just now, I don’t think these people are all bad people. Like most people who appear to be unbelievable, incredible, dumfounding fucking pieces of garbage, I think these people just have some major blind spots in how they see the world.
Most notably, they fundamentally don’t understand their inevitable connection to the rest of the world, and how their actions always, always impact others–even if it’s not totally obvious.
In general, we suck at this–especially in America. There is such an emphasis and pride about individual freedom in this country that things like, “Hey, think about how others have to smell your farts,” get put on the back burner, because, “Actually this is America, and I’m FREE to fart wherever I want!”
Which, you know, kind of misses the point.
Thinking about how your actions impact others is not really a cultural value that we have, and so we tend to be God awful at it.
My Actions…Impact…Other People?
Don’t get me wrong. We understand cause and effect when it’s painfully obvious. We get, “Oh yeah, I was filming a TikTok while driving my Silverado, and I hit an old lady, and she died. Whoops.”
That’s a nice, clear example. We’ve all had moments where we’ve been driving, and thought, “Oh, if I drive like that, I’ll kill someone,” and we’ve fully imagined it in our heads. So we’ve appropriately slowed down, or paid more attention, or at least had our friend film the TikTok.
Because we can foresee that bad result so clearly, we’re mostly not awful drivers.
But as soon as that line of cause and effect gets even slightly murky, or adds even one more step, we tend to get really, really bad at seeing how our actions impact others.
After all, it’s also true that you could go out, mask free, never catch anything, and never hurt anyone. It’s also true that you could take every precaution possible, and still catch COVID, and pass it onto a slew of others and kill 10 people. It’s also true that you’ll likely never know or have to face who you pass it onto, or what their reaction to it will be.
This murkiness surrounding such a mysterious, communicable, delayed, invisible disease severs our emotional connection to cause and effect to the point where, for some of us, it no longer moderates our behavior.
“So,” many of us conclude, “Fuck it! Let’s take a cruise!”
This is why people continue to support companies that destroy the environment while hoping to save it.
This is why people don’t pick up their dog’s shit.
This is why people can say they love gay people, and still eat at Chick Fil-A.
If we were able to viscerally see the results of climate change when we bought irresponsibly, most of us would opt out of it.
If we could foresee our dog’s shit ruining someone else’s Jordan’s, we’d pick it up.
If we could see a clear, visceral impact of the awful organizations to which Chick Fil-A donates their money, most of us would start Youtubing how to pressure cook our own damn chicken breasts.
The impact of our actions in these cases is just as real as hitting someone with your truck, but it’s not as clear, or direct, or immediate, so we don’t view it the same way. When we have to squint even a little bit to see what the results of our actions are, our tendency is to shrug and opt for whatever is within arm’s reach.
This is understandable. If we tried to fully think through the end impact of every decision we ever made, we’d do like four things a day, and every one of them would have us pulling our hair out, pacing, and accomplishing nothing.
We can’t know the end result of most of the things we do. But we can acknowledge my aforementioned completely irrefutable fact: We’re all connected. Every word you say to someone, or thing you buy, or toilet you flush is doing something. You’re wrong to think your actions don’t matter. They all matter a lot. The way you live your life impacts how we all get to live our lives.
So with that in mind, how do we effectively live in consideration of others?
1) Think of Others Before Just Doing, Buying, or Saying Whatever The Fuck You Want
This seems so basic, doesn’t it? Like when you phrase it that simply, it’s kind of embarrassing that we’re so terrible at this, isn’t it?
But again, an unfettered pursuit of comfort, convenience, and whatever the fuck we want is extremely instinctual, and extremely American. Not thinking about others is as American as racism, hedonism, and blowing shit up. The result is that, to many of us, stopping and thinking about the end impact of our actions on others feels like a radical idea.
But it’s totally not a radical way to approach life, and it’s completely necessary to create a better world. It doesn’t mean that every decision you ever make has to put the rest of the world first. But it does mean that we have to deliberately, and harshly push back against our internalized selfishness.
Are we ever going to get great at this? Absolutely fuck no we aren’t. No matter what, there will be plenty of times where we’ll find ourselves already in the theater watching a rapist director’s movie, or already drinking from a plastic water bottle, or already passing off some shit we read on Facebook as a definite fact to a room full of people, and we’ll go, “Ah dang it. That was an oopsie.”
But if a lot of us can get a little bit better at this, and sometimes remember to prioritize others, then the world can get so, so much better.
2) Be Okay with Getting It Wrong
Of all of the things you can choose to say, buy, or do, you can almost never know what is going to have the ultimate best impact on other people. So, like, chill about that.
All of us have gotten some version of this wrong.
You buy the brand of paper towels with the the leaves on the front, and then find out that CEO funds an R Kelly sex cult.
You vote for the guy who seems to want to help the poor, but oops, he’s drowning in fossil fuel funding.
You encourage your loser friend to believe in herself, but aw fuck, now she’s actually going to go into debt trying to make her cat bakery a thing.
You can’t worry about this too much. It’s when you obsess over knowing the right thing before you take action, that you take the wrong action. That’s when you become paralyzed with indecision, and just opt for whatever is easiest and will make your mouth happiest.
So try to figure what the best decision is for the world, do your best, and accept it when you still accidentally voted for a child molestor, or bought a racist hamburger, or married that fucking guy.
And then…
3) Learn
Understanding how your actions impact the world and adjusting when you notice, “Oh, badly,” is kind of the key to all human progress.
So this means that when you accidentally vote for somebody who represents bad causes, or you accidentally said the wrong thing at that funeral despite your best intentions, trace back your steps and figure out what else you could have learned before doing that. Try to know how you could know better in the future to minimize your own shitty impact.
Here’s the good news. Acting with the world in mind is also good for you. Understanding that we’re all connected makes people feel more connected to you. People will like you more, you’ll understand people better, and you’re likely to be successful than if you just become a single-minded doofus.
So worry about yourself later. You’ll be fine. It’s the world that’s on fire. Try to figure out how you can help put it out, make a concerted effort to give a shit about it, and for your sake and others, put on the damn mask, Karen.
