Forty seconds

On mindfulness, autopilot behaviour, and why empathy without attention changes nothing.

If you don’t take your trolley to the trolley bay, you’re a piece of shit. It takes forty seconds. Block your neighbour’s driveway, play loud music after 9pm on a weekday, stare like a creep or drive slow in a fast line? You are a piece of shit. It is that simple. Whatever bullshit excuse you come up with doesn’t change that fact.

Whether or not you paused the moment before you acted like a piece of shit is beside the point. Now because most who read this will probably attempt to decipher the underlying issues here, I feel compelled to point out that the reason this behaviour is alive and well is because you’re all too busy trying to understand the rot in our communities.

The trolley is irrelevant. And so is the pause.

The most underrated trait in today’s world is mindfulness and if you don’t know what that is here’s a simple explanation: Noticing how your words, choices, and behaviour affect the people around you. Paying attention before you interrupt, dismiss, judge, or react. It is being aware enough to consider the experience in real time.
It means slowing down enough to ask, “How is what I’m doing landing on someone else?”

The trolley doesn’t require morals, virtues or a pat on the back. It requires a simple moment of noticing. An awareness that a trolley left here could drift into a car door, create a hazard or end up being retrieved by someone who didn’t choose to be part of your bullshit antics. The consideration doesn’t need to be elaborate. It just needs to exist long enough to redirect the next forty seconds.

Courtesy and polite behaviour cost nothing. The neighbour who turns their music down before midnight, not because the strata rules say they must, but because they’re not idiots. They know basic science. Sound travels and people are trying to sleep. The driver who creates space for you to merge not because traffic law requires it but because it cost them 5 seconds, and like them, you also need to be somewhere. The person in the shopping aisle who steps aside without being asked because they’re just browsing.

None of these require extraordinary character. They don’t require someone to be virtuous or socially aware in any clinical sense. Just a moment of attention. A brief turn of awareness toward the fact that other people exist, that spaces are shared, that choices have edges. And what they share, structurally, is the lead up to the moment where what’s happening and what could happen meets.

It would be easy to read this as a decline in empathy. The standard diagnosis is that people simply care less about each other than they used to. Which isn’t entirely wrong, but I think it’s incomplete in a way that actually matters. Empathy and attention aren’t the same thing and treating them as interchangeable produces the wrong analysis.

Empathy is the capacity to feel with someone else. To register their situation and feel it enough to affect you. That can be genuine but means nothing if all it is, is a feeling. Sure, it can be briefly experienced, shared and posted. But it has an expiry date that ends the next time you hear a sad song. The feeling is real and so is the gap between the feeling and it having any impact on behaviour. Empathy doesn’t require you to do anything. You can feel genuinely moved by something and still be on your phone forty seconds later. You can care deeply about a cause and still block someone’s driveway. You can consider yourself a good person while your music rattles through someone else’s walls at midnight. The feeling is real. The behaviour that follows tells you everything else.

Empathy without attention is just a personality trait you brag about online. It doesn’t connect the feeling to the next forty seconds.

The neighbours playing music at midnight after being asked not to, aren’t oblivious…they’re just cunts. It’s not a value failure or a case of cultural difference. It’s a failure at basic human decency.

You can’t blame social media or the Freemasons.

This is just people on autopilot with their playlist on shuffle. Autoplay removes the moment of decision. Ignorance isn’t bliss, in this case it’s an excuse to mask their fuckery.

Mindfulness, in this case isn’t some holistic or therapeutic intervention. It isn’t something that requires twenty minutes of meditation before breakfast. It’s the basic capacity to insert a moment of noticing before behaviour follows impulse. The precondition for what we recognise as decent behaviour: politeness, restraint, consideration. The capacity to register that a trolley left in the middle of a car park could create a problem for someone who didn’t create the situation.

The shopping trolley theory works as a moral shorthand not because it reveals character in some deep sense. But because it reveals whether or not, in a fraction of a moment, whether someone has any decency on the surface. The part the world sees. And if that’s absent, then how deep does the rot go?

People are complicated, and autopilot is not the whole explanation. Yes, there may be deeper underlying issues that need to be addressed. But it’s not our responsibility to fix or decipher. Our roles are to coexist in shared spaces as peacefully as possible in a world that’s getting crazier by the day.

The Trolley Theory works because it weighs exactly what should be measured. Forty seconds of someone’s time without an audience, enforcement or moral weight. Just forty seconds of noticing.

Mindfulness used to be the floor.

Now it appears to be the ceiling.

Don’t be a piece of shit.

Put your trolley away.