Upon accepting the offer to perform a year of national service in Livingston, Montana, I quickly realized how troubled the market for housing was. Most of the rental units had sky-high rent in the thousands of dollars that would have accounted for all of my living stipend on their own. Luckily, I was able to find a room to rent in a shared housing unit in what was until recently, a hospital. This was how I ended up with five men for roommates.

This soon presented a new set of challenges, often centering sanitation and hygiene, as well as interpersonal tolerance. It was clear that the attitude of ‘not my mess, not my problem’ reigned supreme in the shared spaces, with dishes left to fester in the sink and maggots in the unlined trash can. 

While helping to move me in, my dad leaned against a windowsill, only for his palm to come away coated in a thick layer of dead gnats. After hurrying to the bathroom to wash his hand, he came back to tell me there was no hand soap, or even toilet paper. Later on, I heard that the toilet in that bathroom had to be replaced due to ‘concerns’ the landlord had. I didn’t inquire further, and instead moved to a room with an en suite bathroom.

Instead of adapting to this way of living, I took out the trash and cleaned the bin. I vacuumed up the piles of flies in every corner. This wasn’t done in any specific effort to improve the overall quality of life, but instead to build my own. From a selfish motivation, I wanted a clean kitchen. 

I opened the spare fridge and found the food to be horribly expired. According to the most senior of my new roommates, a man had moved out and left it all to mold over. I threw it all out and scrubbed the fridge back to a usable condition.

I carried on, rearranging the sparse furniture and adding to it when I saw a curbside table or chair. Slowly, the common areas started to seem livable, and more, lived in. 

As I settled into the rhythm of day-to-day life, resentment built towards my roommates. Justified or not, I had a problem with the standard of living they had all seemingly agreed to.

It wasn’t until I had an epiphany while serving with my host site that the situation seemed to ease up in my mind.

Clearly, there are some people who don’t share my value of keeping a clean living environment. There are some who wouldn’t care what happened to our shared home, so long as their immediate surroundings and living space that is solely theirs remains up to their individual standards. 

If one person made a mess, and refuses to acknowledge it, then who will clean it?

From this, I drew the comparison to a polluted world, in which those most responsible will never admit their impact, let alone act to remedy the situation they put the rest of the world into. Instead of standing around arguing about who’s turn it is to take out the trash, it’s sometimes necessary to just take on the responsibility yourself.

It’s okay to clean up other people’s messes, if it helps to build the future you want for yourself. Torn between selfishness and selflessness, maybe all that matters is the impact.

Many of the people most responsible for the climate crisis are dead and gone by now, leaving us with the unwanted legacy of a warming planet and rising sea levels. Instead, it’s up to us to take accountability for someone else’s mess, and to do the dirty work of cleaning it up before it’s too late.