So, the inevitable happened: You chugged too much water when you were out and about and now have to scramble to a public bathroom. But as you make your way to the first bathroom you see, you remember why it’s so hard to have any positive thoughts on humanity when you walk through three unflushed stalls in a row and have to settle for a seemingly clear but suspiciously scented toilet, but here’s how to believe humans care for each other even though you’ve seen a public bathroom before.
Practice empathy.
Sure, the bathroom floor may be peppered with ripped and potentially used toilet paper and there’s questionable liquid on the toilet seat cover, but remember the hallmark tenet of empathy – put yourself in others’ shoes. Take an open-minded perspective and try to understand why past strangers might have not taken the time to flush or even attempt to clean-up after themselves. Maybe they learned a loved one was dying and had to leave mid-pee, or their child was kidnapped and they only have a short window of time to find them safely. You never know what anyone else is going through in their lives and maybe the people who visited the bathroom before you had a very good reason for leaving the space absolutely fucking disgusting. Every single one of them.
Remember the duality of man.
Just because people are inconsiderate enough to turn a public bathroom into an absolute assault on the human senses, does not mean they are always bad. As philosophers have been saying for centuries, human nature is not singular; man can be both good and evil. Maybe the people who completely ignore the social contract of being sanitary in shared spaces are absolute saints outside of public bathrooms. For every pube they leave on the toilet, they could also be donating to Red Cross or something.
Maybe stop going to public bathrooms.
There’s only so much open-mindedness one can do to justify the goodness of humans when there’s literal shit smeared on the walls of a bathroom stall. When it’s just one shit-smear too many, it may be time to take a break from public bathrooms and watch Amélie or those compilations of soldiers returning to families to remember that humans do care for each other, even when every public bathroom ever attests to the contrary.
It may be blind optimism, but you can still believe that humans are compassionate creatures even after surviving the horrors of a public bathroom. It just takes an open-mind, a strong resolve, and some willful denial!
