When I asked one of the locals I met in the market about the thrash she sees every day, she replied sheepishly that it is part and parcel of the marketplace. She admits that she tried to sweep it every day before it piles up and gets out of hand, but it is mostly in vain as the next day people continue to litter on the road. “Even if we try to clean it up, it is useless as others will continue littering”. So most of their cleaning up attempt is half-hearted. Admittedly, it is the marketplace, most bustling area of the community with fish, fruits, meat, and vegetables sold every day. It is bound to be dirty, and smelly. However, I did note that there are rubbish bins provided in the marketplace, such as the brown basket seen in Image 7.1 below, albeit it looking slightly tattered and ineffective. People still throw it on the roadside and even into the drain (Image 7.2).

One of my interviewees, a 28-year-old young adult, also made the same comment of the vanity of trying to clean up the road. Even if he tries to clean it up, others will only continue throwing and it is never-ending.

The Psychological Stress Theory

Image 7.3 Simplified Model of the Psychological Stress Theory (Graphic Image by Fidelia Beatrice)

According to the Psychological Stress Theory, people decide on how they deal with a situation or a stressor through stages of appraisal. Firstly the stressor, and then their means of coping. Their appraisal would then result in whether they choose to cope through a problem-focused mechanism or emotional-focused mechanism.

First Appraisal – Assess Stressor

The rubbish that is piling up around their living environment is an ambient stressor. An ambient stressor is a stress that is part of the background, such as pollution and dirty environment.

Their appraisal of their stressor is one of the background disturbance. It does not disturb them yet it remains at the back of their head, like an annoying fly. In the course of my interview, many of them noted that they had thoughts and worries on the growing amount of rubbish around their house, but decided to ignore it.

Second Appraisal – Assess Coping

Many seem to realize that to cope with this, there are two things to do. First is to stop the habit of littering both on the roadside and into the sea and second is to start cleaning up the piled garbage.

As the first one is an individual action, it seems like an easier thing to do. However, to start cleaning up the garbage is very difficult. This is because everyone has a common understanding of deeply ingrained littering behavior of the society, and thus felt that even if they start cleaning it up, people would still continue to throw and it would be useless. Ironically this difficulty thus caused people to continue littering as they felt that an individual’s change of behavior will not create a change in the environment.

Learned Helplessness

And so, the impossibility of the situation led to everyone taking on an emotion-focused mechanism of dealing with the litters around them. People avoid the problem, not thinking much of their action as they throw and have a fatalism perspective.

An over-reliance of emotion-coping mechanism in turn leads to Learned Helplessness

They felt helpless when there are actually ways to tackle it, such as community involvement and cooperation.