[vel0city]

There's 8 billion people so my actions don't matter. I guess I'll pour all my old paint and paint thinner down the storm drains. Maybe my motor oil and used coolants as well. After all I'm just one person out of 8 billion, my actions don't matter.

I'll just litter all my stuff as well. Single use plastics? Sign me up, I'll just throw it out in the street. I'm only one of a few million in my city, my actions don't really matter.

Or maybe my actions really do matter.

[piaste]

Your actions do not, indeed, matter. Neither does your vote, or your boycotting of $global_evil_corp, precisely because there's millions or billions of people involved. (To be pedantic: while not literally zero, your actions matter several order of magnitude less than would be necessary to be able to perceive their effects.)

But that's a really hard pill to swallow. Your post is a beautiful example of that difficulty: you spell out examples of how your actions don't matter [as much as you would like], and then wildly swing into open denial with "Or maybe my actions do really matter".

My advice - if you focus on the consequences of your actions that you can actually perceive, instead of the ones you only wish you could, you'll be less frustrated. For example, helping your local community will typically give you far better returns than trying to improve any global issue.

[vel0city]

So you're saying my neighbors and I should feel fine throwing old car batteries in the lake and switching back to leaded gas?

[piaste]

I'm saying that lakes don't get saved when people virtuously choose to individually stop throwing trash into it: they get saved when the entity in control of the lake forbids throwing trash into them, and enforces that ban.

If leaded gas was still being legally sold alongside unleaded one, people like you would be passionately arguing for decades about why it's everyone's moral duty to pay extra for unleaded gas, and you would feel so proud every time you stopped at the green pump instead of the black one.

And meanwhile we would all be breathing lead.

[vel0city]

So your stance is feel free to keep doing things you know is overall bad for society until we bother passing a law and pushing enforcement to eliminate the activity?

I don't know about you, but if pumps had leaded gas and unleaded gas, I'd still be going for the unleaded every time along with trying to lobby for change. I'd absolutely be telling everyone I know not to use the leaded gas and try and change everyone around me to get rid of it. I would not just shrug and say "lots of other people are using leaded gas, I might as well as well, my use doesn't matter!" Meanwhile I guess your stance is to just use the leaded gas despite knowing how bad it is and telling everyone else to keep using it anyways until they finally tear the pumps out of the ground.

It's people thinking "my use doesn't really matter!" that is massive problem. Imagine how much easier things would be if people just did the right thing instead of assuming their actions don't matter.

Each rain drop isn't much water, they don't really matter. Yet floods destroy cities. Where does the flood come from?

[ryukafalz]

Japan stays free of litter because residents keep it that way (despite not having many trash cans in public), not because someone's there watching over everyone and enforcing it: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20191006-what-japan-can-t...

Individual actions may not make much of a difference on their own but in aggregate they do.