Morality is the intutive notion we all have inside us telling us what is right or wrong. Of course we can all come up with different conclusions based on the difference of our cultures but thats a topic for later. Generally speaking, its quite intuitive to tell whether or not some things fall into the right or the wrong, e.g., killing is wrong, giving to the poor is right, stealing is wrong, helping someone who got into an accident is right. However there can be exceptions, such as killing could be tolerated in self defense, giving to the poor can exacerbate their problems (e.g., some heroin addicts just can't be handed money, otherwise it will ruin their lives), stealing can be tolerated when that which is stolen was rightfully ours in the first place, and sometimes leaving an accident scene be is sometimes wiser than potentially making things worse; since you're not a professional paramedic.
However those are exceptions, that do not negate the validity of the former examples. These occasions are reserved for special occasions where there are more nuance to the situation. However one who jumps too fast to the exceptional examples as a course of action might be considered a psychopath that doesn't have a moral restraint and acts solely on logic or their interests. But enough about defining morality, here is how cleanup comes in.
The fact that cleanup is morally right is no longer something we should question. We (The Sanitizer Initative) aren't here to tell people that cleanup has to be done. Lets not play stupid, everybody knows that cleanup has to be done, given the blatantly obvious visual state of the world which is filled with plastic trash even into the smallest cracks. Its like when your room is messy and you don't clean it for several days or even weeks (Trust me I've been there). It's not because you don't think cleanup is necessary, you know its necessary. You might be procrastinating, you might be depressed, stressed, you don't know where to start, you have mild dyslexia and therefore find it difficult to catergorize your items.
The state of my room changed a lot since I watched a lot of Jordan Peterson on YouTube. He is a clinical psychologist and also a professor of psychology at Alberta University Canada. He has over 30 years of experience and over 2000 hours of just listening to people's problems as a clinical psychologist. He repeatedly stresses the importance of cleaning our rooms. Because the room isn't just a physical space, it is also a field of experience that can be traced back to the mind of the person who creates its state. To put simply, a messy room means a messy head. He suggests that we can begin to sort out our cluttered mind by setting order to our cluttered room.
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| Image 1.1 hmm okay this looks like a good meme format. Upload your own room transormation pics. |
Prior to 2020, I have always been a messy person, or in Peterson's clinical terms "Low in trait-orderliness" and have always had a messy room. However, while my room was messy, I was out there cleaning up hundreds and thousands of KG of plastic trash in the environment. This is because I cleaned up not because of and "OCD-esk" drive, it was because of morality. I thought of cleanup as a virtuous cause, a holy war; and that I needed to remove plastic trash from the ecosystem at all costs. Didn't matter that I had trash all over my room, after all, "its not out there killing a sea turtle (image 1.2), its here in my room safeguarded by me, right?"
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| 1.2 image credit NJ Robinson, @wildbluescience, https://www.instagram.com/wild.blue.science/ |
Little did I know that even though all that clutter in my room was keeping the environment safe from it, it was bad for my mental health. I felt unhappy, felt like I had no sense of direction in life, and no priorities in order. This in turn hurt my cleanup performance outside. I felt a cognitive dissonance, between my actions outside my house and actions at home. I felt like I was playing an act instead of truly expressing myself.
I left the plastic litter cleanup world in 2018 for the reasons you can see in this video:
During my hiatus I rediscovered the joy in cleanup when I was cleaning my own room. I felt cleanup as being somewhat therapeutic. In 2021 I was clinically diagnosed with a certain mental illness that might explain why I've been so depressed in the past few years. Setting my room in order seems to have stabilized the fluctiations I experienced in my head. It's my medication.
The beginning of 2022 sucked, I lost my GF, lost a good friend of mine due to my own stupidity, and sunk further down into a hole of depression. I thought at this point I had nothing to lose. So with nothing better to do, I decided to step outside my front door for the first time to finally socialize with my neighbors whom I've been distant from since we moved here right at the beginning of the pandemic. In this video I made a friend, a neighbor of mine his name is Mr. Gustav:
To my surprise, the moment I decided to start cleaning up again humbly without boasting on social media or expecting people to come along and join--I was simply doing my therapy--many things in my life fell into place. Just like how cleaning my room set my mind in order, cleaning up the neighborhood set my social life in order. I am a new resident here in Rawajaha Village, and the last thing I want to have happen is to be labelled by the community as being "an isolated rich person" we are by no means rich. Pff I wish. But the difference in culture with the local people is quite enough for people to see that my family is culturally distinct (we were outsiders after all). I find it severely difficult to socially bond with these people due to the cultural difference, however cleanup has give me a reason to bond with the community starting with the children!
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| Image 1.3, there are 3 Rafli's in my village, Rafli, Rafli. & Rafli. They began just looking at me cleanup alone, until one day they just participated on the fly. |
Also, cleanup being something mutually beneficial for both me (mentally) and for the community gives me pretty good reason to approach people in power to support my actions. Having returned to cleanup has given me the confidence to approach local organizations that share the same interests when it comes to cleaning up the region. Here is a video of me meeting with the LPM/Kompepar and helping them cleaning up the lake in our village:
And here is a video from earlier that month where me and my friend Fatur interviewed some people regarding trash, some of which are tourists. (The lake in our village is also a tourism site btw):
March 2022 has been a wonderful month. All thanks to cleanup.
The Sanitizer Initiative has been revitalized, our motivations have become less about changing people and more about trying to make cleanup as fun and enjoyable as possible for us. After all that's all that matters. We plan on increasing our focus on content creation since we genuinely enjoy it regardless of people's responses. Getting likes feels good, but nothing beats the feeling of looking back on our page and seeing all that we've accomplished in the past year or so. I want to die happy knowing I did something with my short-lived life.
A good friend of mine who participated in cleanup recently, I'll keep his name anonymous since thats what he'd want. Had a conversation about suicide. I don't like to talk about this but the thought of suicide has been with me for at least 4 years. It still haunts me from time to time and that's one of the reasons I started medication in 2021. Sometimes I legit want to leave this world, not because of a particular sadness, stress, or debt. But because I am disturbed by the apparent pointlessness of existence, sometimes it gets to me and I just wish I was gone. So recently, that friend of mine shared some readings about meaning in life. Readings that he recommended include Albert Camus' A Happy Death. and quotes by Camus such as "should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee." My friend tells me how my recent return to cleaning up trash in 2022 is a form of me "having a cup of coffee." Its a small thing to do, and is meaningless in the face of the vast emptiness of space. But its a form of existential struggle.
here is a video of Jordan Peterson explaining how cleaning up your room is a form of Psycho-therapy:
As far as I'm aware, I'm just cleaning up because its therapeutic and it makes me feel good. If I ever have motivations beyond that (fame, money, to get laid), thats a corruption. Sure, I will find ways to monetize what I can from cleanup such as selling my inventions and hopefully AdSense from YouTube. Merely because I need money to survive, look I don't have a job as of now. I still haven't graduated college which is quite tardy for a person my age. Its unlikely I'll ever get an okay-paying job. So please cut me some slack for profiting from cleanup just a little bit. its not based off of greed but desperation, making trashpickers and cleanup videos is one of the few skills I know I am good at.
(13/04/22) The Sanitizer Initative is not an NGO, its not a non-profit, as of now its a symbol. A symbol of my search for meaning in life and struggle to fit into society. Whether or not we profit from it will be discussed later, since it takes a decent amount of time and effort for me and Fatur to make and edit videos, I still have to pay for my 3D printer that I used to develop the trashpickers. As of now "what we are legally" is still in discussion. But our message persists: we want to make cleanup fun. Be it all voluntary like Trash Hero and World Cleanup Day, or profit oriented like Waste4Change and Garbo Grabber. We all aim to make a change while being predisposed to different conditions with our unique skills, resources, and needs.
We'll find a way.
