To receive flyers

I went out walking for lunch today. I don’t know how common it is for people to hand out flyers on the streets anymore, but there is no harm in receiving a flyer (assuming you’re in safe conditions et cetera). The person gets paid to hand out a flyer; receiving a flyer helps them do their job and it doesn’t really negatively affect you. If you don’t want it, then you can discard it later. Usually, the cost for you to accept a flyer being handed to you is less than the cost it is for the person doing the handing. (So it would tend towards a more socially optimal state if you were to receive the flyer.) You could make their lives a little bit easier. Yes, maybe the flyer is not relevant to you, and so it may be fruitless to accept such a thing. But if it looks like the person is struggling to hand out the flyers, then I personally don’t see what is so bad about receiving one, whether it is relevant to you or not.

I think this reflects a little bit on the state of our society. If everybody exercised a little bit more empathy, then the person handing out flyers would have an easier job. I think about the difficulty of doing a job like such, constantly being rejected, and though it may not be personal, rejection is rejection. You can give the argument that the world is a cruel, harsh place and that everybody is looking out for themselves, but in such a particular scenario, showing a tiny bit of consideration even though it may be slightly inconvenient is not so awful. Maybe the person handing out flyers doesn’t care or doesn’t want to be helped, but is it seriously the end of the world if that is the case? Showing some empathy isn’t a weakness, it’s a human quality that we should care more about. In no ways am I trying to impose how I think people should behave. I am simply a little dismayed at how long it has taken me to internalize such a perspective on accepting flyers. I am also more aware of the general, but not apparently visible, sense of apathy that floats among us.