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> But WHY do I do it? Why do I feel like I HAVE to do it? Am I actually experiencing any benefit in life over those who don't?

If I try to dig in deeper for why I also feel that way, I guess it's not about coercion or fear of judgement/retribution. I just have an innate understanding that other people have their own lives, and I don't feel like it's worth it to do things that have a minuscule "benefit" for me while being a far outweighed drawback for multiple strangers. Even though it doesn't benefit me, it does benefit the community I'm in, and is one of many things that make the society I live in relatively nice.

Not returning the shopping cart saves a rounding error's worth of time, but now multiple car drivers are annoyed in a major way when shopping carts are rolling back and forth, ramming into parked cars or taking up empty parking spots. Employees now have to spend more of their time getting all the carts, sometimes in bad weather. Not worth it.

Holding the subway door saves several minutes for me, but makes the schedule tighter for the operator and forces hundreds of people to wait a few more seconds for me. This difference between my benefit and others' drawback isn't as drastic as the shopping carts, so the bar for me to do it is lower (I would probably do it if trains were >10 minutes apart). But it also has a sketchy feeling to it - I'd trust that the train will remain stopped, but the chance of you getting caught on the side of a moving train is >0%. It has happened many times before, especially in older systems.

I don't see what the benefit is for leaving a highway at the last possible second. If anything, this erratic behavior is unexpected and is more likely to lead to an accident. Not worth it, even discounting any feelings you have for other people.

> I don't see what the benefit is for leaving a highway at the last possible second. If anything, this erratic behavior is unexpected and is more likely to lead to an accident. Not worth it, even discounting any feelings you have for other people.

In large metro areas, exit lanes can be back up, usually because there is a light at the end of the exit. For instance, exit 32 on the BQE can backup to the point that you sit in the exit lane for 10+ minutes as batches of cars move through the intersection. To circumvent the wait, some people just pull up to the front of the exit lane and merge in and go through the next next batch of lights. A lot of people will try to prevent you from merging, but someone will always eventually let you through. It's called exit lane jumping. It's illegal but I highly doubt anyone gets pulled over for it.

Interesting! I've seen this happen a few times, though I've never witnessed something as extreme as a 10+ minute wait just for the off-ramp. I still maintain that it seems dangerous regardless of the situation, because while someone stops and tries to cut in line, the non-off-ramp lane they're stopped on can still keep moving, creating opportunities for collisions.

It's more common in larger metro areas - NYC, LA and Atlanta are infamous for it - but can happen anywhere depending on what is going on further down the exit lane (an emergency vehicle, car breakdown, etc).

Chicago's Lake Shore Drive/Belmont intersection has 3 stoplights you have to pass to get out. During rush hour it sometimes gets so backed up my bus has gotten stuck in it for a half hour. The first light is for the northbound on/off and a small side street that goes to some tennis/etc courts, the second for southbound on/off, and the side street adjacent to LSD splits in two so the third light is for the same street as the second light and is where you can finally enter it.

I think the issue is that the long-term decline in social trust—and the accompanying rise in surveillance, authoritarian enforcement, and costs/prices—happens too slowly for people to notice and associate with their own actions. If every time they left a cart out there was a new camera or scowling security officer on their next visit, they might notice and change their behavior. But as it is, they don’t notice their own contribution to the consequences that they so often complain about.

(Just so nobody misunderstands me, this is not to say that I want more cameras and security officers. Quite the opposite, which is why I don’t like casual antisocial behavior and petty crime.)

>But WHY do I do it? Why do I feel like I HAVE to do it? Am I actually experiencing any benefit in life over those who don't?

You start to skip the little things in life and it creeps up into the big things. "Do I have to return the shopping cart?" "Do I have to cook tonight?" "Do I have to shower today?" "Do I have to acknowledge that chatty neighbor and instead just walk past him?".

When your care starts to slip about participating in society, you start to disassociate with society. And I think times like these are where we need to care more than ever about participating.

Zipper merging is the correct merging assuming you keep speeds correct.

States that are “too polite” to do it have to remind people to do it.

https://www.dot.state.mn.us/zippermerge/

There's a difference between zipper merging on a lane closure (which is what the article described) and what the person you are responding to described.

You are not supposed to block your lane of traffic because you didn't want to wait like everyone else.

A zipper merge is only applicable to a lane that is ending or has an obligation to merge. In exit lane jumping, the car is coming from a lane that does not end and has no obligation to merge. In fact, at their point of entry, you will notice a solid white separating the two lanes, indicating you cannot even legally merge.

There's no moral hazard to not brushing your teeth. If you want a healthy society, you have to brush your parking lots.

No moral hazard, but there is a hazard to not brushing your teeth: cavities, and more explicitly, the financial cost of having cavities repaired. Even the best dental insurance plans in America are capped at $1500 - $3000 of benefits a year, usually less than a single root canal or crown.

But that does open the door to a very interesting question (far outside of the scope of this discussion): would people change their habits of brushing their teeth if that hazard didn't exist, e.g. your dental repairs were free? D:

One explanation I've heard that resonates with me is that we subconsciously feel as if we're playing a more complex and less obvious version of the prisoner's dilemma.

We intuitively understand that society experiences the greatest collective benefit when people generally cooperate. We also understand that while defecting (i.e. behaving in a selfish and anti-social way) might benefit us more as individuals, that's only true so long as others aren't also defecting. If they do, not only is society worse off but you personally are worse off as well than if everybody cooperated. And we understand that personally defecting leads to others doing the same.

Leaving your cart randomly in the parking lot, holding the train door open, or cutting across traffic may optimize your personal outcome, but the more people who behave like you the worse your grocery store parking lot experience gets, the more delayed your train is, and the longer you're stuck in traffic.

The nuance here is that modern societies are large enough that you can buy into the idea that your personal behavior does not influence the behavior of others in a way that will come back around to bite you. In a large metro area, what is the probability that the driver you cut off will be in a position to cut you off tomorrow? Ignoring the fact that society is smaller than you think when you look at sub groups like people who regularly drive on a certain road at a certain time, you have to consider second and third order effects. If cutting people off in traffic leads to more people cutting each other off in traffic, the impact spreads until it could easily come back around to your personal traffic experience with a few degrees of separation.

Fundamentally I think rational self-optimizing people realize that shitty personal behavior leads if only in a small way to the overall enshitification of society and that sooner or later this will come back around to negatively impact them personally. The people who engage in such behavior anyways aren't more rationally self-optimizing, they're either too stupid to see the connection or nihilistic enough to not care.