The Tin, The Tissue, and The Tension

Recycling Quirks for The Masses

Where I live, garbage and recycling pickup day is Friday. The end of the week and end of the trash bin, all at once. It can be a little much for an ordinary person to handle.

The garbage collectors – or pickup artists – are erratic in their timing, and the prospect of missing the truck looms so large and terrifying in my nightmares that sacrificing even the most riveting Thursday night action is well worth it, to ensure this travesty does not occur.

At any cost.

Yet all too often on Friday morning I find myself with an empty cardboard box or ball of aluminum foil. It belongs in recycling. Like, the bins I use throughout the week, which are 3 metres from my kitchen counter and are progressively emptied throughout the week into the larger bins in the garage, and collected by the pickup artists on Friday morning.

Why then am I overcome by the urge to shatter the simple harmony of this system, walk 30 metres (sometimes in the middle of winter) to the curb, and toss one little ball of foil into the big blue boxes awaiting their pickup?

This is senseless behaviour on my part, yet I see people doing it all the time. The last-minute frenzy, the buzzer-beater, to get some little scrap of metal taken away and not need to live another week with it in my possession. And by ‘live with it,’ we’re not talking about sleeping with an empty tunacan beneath my pillow. We’re talking about it sitting in the bin that it would normally sit in for a couple days, were it Tuesday, Sunday, or any other day of the week. We could run through all the days by name, but you should know them by now.

I asked Jeeves to explain this borderline-OCD activity and Jeeves said that people don’t like having garbage in their houses. Answers like this are why Jeeves, Clippy, and the Hamburglar have had their cubicles relocated to the dimly-lit and otherwise inaccessible 7½ floor.

Fine. People don’t like having garbage around them. If that was it, this wouldn’t be a blog post. Then again, I have a whole library of blog posts elaborating more trivial points than this, so maybe I’m being a trifle harsh on old Jeeves.

But actually. Why is a rational creature willing to invite such inconvenience into his world to discard one trivial piece of trash, when there’s a continual, smooth system to absorb it with nearly no effort? If we had reason to believe that the pickup artists were so erratic that they might start taking weeks off, or go on strike, then fine. As far as I’m aware, they’ll be here on Friday.

Now’s the moment when I would like to display my excellent investment in becoming a bachelor of philosophy. Here’s a thought experiment that years of falling asleep during Kant and Descartes and Sartre readings have enabled me to concoct. Actually, you can probably concoct pretty good ones too, without a bachelor of philosophy and years of falling asleep during impossible readings. Damn. On with it.

As I type this, it’s Tuesday. Pickup day is half a week away. Suppose we set a bin out on the curb right now and I finish a carton of milk. Will I walk it out there, or use the one in my home? Here’s the answer: the only thing on my mind related to that bin on the curb on a Tuesday night is that someone might steal it if I leave it out for so long. It’s absurd to walk a single milk carton out there. That’s a lot of transport effort for a very small load.

My spidey sense – and academically-recognized reasoning capabilities – tell me the Friday morning hustle to the curb has a lot to do with it being Friday morning. A lot to do with scarcity. A thing is happening that only happens once a week and I want to make sure I don’t miss it.

But still. Miss what?

Deeper down, the Friday-morning frenzy is a ridiculous, inconsequential way to eliminate tension. In some areas of life, tension is toxic. Like tension between estranged siblings at a parent’s funeral. No good. Yet there are all sorts of tensions we need, in order to live exciting lives. A story without a bad character or a problem is a story without conflict, and a story without conflict is a story without tension. We don’t want Eve (or Snow White) to eat the apple, but without the tension these great stories devolve into descriptions of some weird events and we’re not along for the ride.

At some level we know how important tension can be, but a part of us wants to discharge it just like two oppositely-charged objects will discharge their tension with a spark. Or a bolt of lightning.

⚡️.

We’re faced with countless opportunities to hold (or create) tension during a typical day. Not filling the silence after you finish a solid statement. Telling a joke you aren’t sure will work. Not immediately tackling the freshest incoming work task, so you can stay focused on what you’re doing.

I’ve mentioned the marshmallow test before – it has uncanny predictive powers, of how successful a person will be in pretty much every area of their lives (excluding the immediate consumption of marshmallows). The test is essentially measuring how much tension this poor five-year-old can hold, because holding tension is a crucial life skill.

And it all goes out the window (or more accurately the front door) every Friday morning that I find myself with a bit of extra recycling in my hand, and an uncollected bin sitting at the curb.

Toss it in the nearby bin, and hold the tin, the tissue, and the tension for another week. It’s good practice for the moments that really count.