Does anyone else feel sad when plants die?

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why? nobody answered my question. if i carelessly jack off is that a tragedy of epic proportions then?

Some things are hard to explain; perhaps it is was the Hollywood social programming but seeing the environment, animals, and obviously people be destroyed is not something I enjoy. Some people unfortunately take pleasure in destroying things that are beautiful, tearing things down to elevate themselves to make themselves feel dominant and in control. Growing anything takes a lot of time, effort, and emotional investment so in a way it your children which you are naturally loving and protective of.

The defenseless being victimized by wastefulness and plain selfishness is very upsetting, you can rationalize a lot of things but desecration and waste aren't some of them.

haha yeah hollywood sure does love to push that environmentalist agenda down your throat.
i understand you feeling bad if your homegrown plant that you develop a fondness to over time withers up and dies i guess (not something i have experience with really), but like i don't weep when i see a tree being cut down or something.
i don't see sentimental value in something on the basis of it being 'life' alone, all life is is a complex arrangement of atoms.
like i said a lot of things that are alive almost nobody feels sorry for, such as maggots or even your own individual skin cells for example (not to mention fetuses for god's sake).
plants to me aren't much more than skin cells. they have no mind and they're pretty hard to anthropomorphize or develop a relationship with like we do with animals.

Sperm aren't alive. They're zygotes for God's sake. So masturbate guilt-free. But, yes I do feel sad when I accidentally kill an insect. Why? Because your supposition, that generally held by humanity, is likely ignorant that plants can't feel since they don't have nervous systems that are close enough to something recognizable to our narrow mindset. One thing I've learned as a scientist and someone quite educated, is that we don't know jack. As a physician, I know that the majority of diseases we have no idea was the etiology is. The idea that maggots, or snakes, or rats, or bugs, or plants are any less alive and less worthy of respect is biased and nonsensical.

We've made ourselves very comfortably ignorant on this planet in order to maintain the status quo, that where we largely get what we want and think we know so damn much. We don't. So we assume - we assume that which we don't have sound evidence for does not exist, and that's a damn foolish conclusion.

And if one believes that sentiment is lacking in those with ASD, one may be wrong about that as well.

a scientist who believes that:

1. sperm aren't alive (under most definitions they are, but of course life as a term is subjective. it's not however crazy at all to say that they're living like you seem to think it is)
2. sperm are zygotes, not the cell which combines with the female egg to produce the zygote
3. it's ignorant to think that plants don't feel and have emotional lives too
4. maggots and rats possess the same moral value as a person

christ, you're from trumpville are you? now i can see why trump university has a bad name..

Last edited by schopenhauer with a keyboard on 21 Dec 2016, 10:10 am, edited 2 times in total.

Yes! I have a chilli plant who's not coping well this winter and I am worried he'll die soon hoping he just might make it through

Thanks for the correction on the zygote bit. clearly i've forgotten some things. But nevertheless, if you consider sperm alive, then by all means, shed a tear for each and every one if you wish. I, myself, don't (I would've wept a great, great deal ). You didn't finish your statement, and since my powers of perception are hindered I'm guessing that you believe someone who believes this is mistaken?

If it's ignorant to think that plants don't feel and have emotional lives, as far as moral values go (Schopenhauer) I see these as irrelevant (of course I enjoyed philosophy about as much as a root canal). Our understanding of living systems is phenomenally rudimentary. Is a virus alive? IDK. I guess I don't care, either. But I am distressed by humanity's willingness to treat billions of animals inhumanely, without a second thought and without any awareness. Why are snakes or rats worse than cats or elephants, or a ficus?

Re: Trumpville - that's me being profoundly distressed that he's about to enter the not-so-round office... Although I did apply to Trump Univ., but unfortunately they rejected me

I don't really feel "sad" when houseplants die, though I do get upset when people cut down trees, because I know how long it took for that tree to grow, and I see it as a representation of how humans are carelessly destroying the planet. I'm really terrible at keeping plants alive. The only plant I've successfully raised was a little bamboo stalk I got from Ikea. It's really easy because all I have to do is put it in the line of sight of my window (across the room, as bamboo are sensitive to too much light) and keep it in a permanently wet environment. Mine has been living in a plastic disposable water bottle full of water and rocks for about six years now, and it's thriving; its roots are healthy, and the tiny little leaf sprouts it started with have flourished into individual stalks close to nine inches high.

Yes, but only because it's symbolic of my inability to remember things, like watering the plants.

seeing an ancient, massive old tree being brought down, and seeing a little sprout get trampled underfoot are two different things. i'm more likely to mourn the giant being brought to its knees than the larva being snuffed out before it had a chance to "experience" its own life.

personally, this only goes for plants.

the latter happens much more often in nature, and is the reason plants, and many animals too, produce so many potential offspring. they don't all make it. humans (and many other "higher" vertebrates) are unusual in that they care for their offspring after birth well, most of us... and so have relatively few of them when you compare to invertebrates, or fish.

that being said, i mourned for the bonsai trees and carnivorous plants i had as a kid, they they eventually withered and died.

i have developed an emotional attachment to a bottle of baby oil i bought over 3 years ago that i still have not used up, and it's doing nothing it taking up space. beat that.

I had a job for a few months merchandising the plants in a store. The dead ones had to be thrown out every week, which made me unhappy. I would put it off for a long time, hoping people would buy the plants, but eventually they all had to go. Occasionally a customer would comment with more empathy than me, about being sad about the dead plants.

Mostly I felt guilty when I (inevitably, from clumsiness and handling thousands of them) dropped a plant and spilled its dirt everywhere. On the rare occasion that I destroyed a plant, I would feel remorse for the rest of the day, and that certainly wasn't because it was a wasted product.

I think it's more about the plants being alive and beautiful, not attributing any feeling to them. It's sad when a beautiful thing is destroyed, especially for no reason. I feel the same way about computers.