Bubble Wrap.

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I used to enjoy popping bubble wrap when I was a child. We didn't see it often as it took a long time before it became popular. However, these days (Probably from about 15 years ago or more) I feel sorry for the bubbles and if someone pops them it is like they are being killed.

I don't know if this is the right place to post bubble wrap as a subject. But I do think that it is wrong to pop the bubbles. Have a heart. Let them live for another day!

Whattha….?

They are not living beings. So how can you feel sorry for them?

There are inanimate objects that I can get emotionally involved with and even anthropormorphize. But the bubbles in bubble wrap are not an example of that. After you unpack the thing you ordered out of the box, the bubble wrap is just trash! Lol! You might even burn it to kindle logs in your fireplace.

I have bubblewrap in my bedroom. We also hve a whole big roll of it in one of the sheds. Not sure where it came from. I use it to wrap trains in to send them to new owners. (I am keeping some trains. Just reducing the collection as I was needing the funds to survive, and also my collection was becoming slightly out of control, even though I had hardly bought anything for the last 8 to 10 years... (I changed scale to my new love of 7mm narrow gauge!)
So the bubble wrap is happily being used for what it was intended for and I am happy.
Bubble wrap really enjoys going on journeys...

I've got a huge roll of bubblewrap in my garage. You just can't throw it away... you never know when it will come in handy. I hate it when I get stuff delivered and it's got that chewed-up cardboard straw in it rather than bubblewrap... that just goes straight in the recycling bin.
What I particularly like are those little bits of bubblewrap that are formed into pouches so you can just put stuff in without having to wrap it up.

Whenever I have bubble wrap, which is usually when a package from Ebay or Amazon arrives for me, I will pop the little buggers like it's going out of style.

One time I even walked over a sheet of bubble wrap while wearing my shoes. So satisfying.

Bubble wrap is NOT alive. It does not eat, it does not breathe, it does not grow. Therefor, it is not alive. (something I used to hear on Sesame Street a lot).

Ooh. Sesame Street. It used to be in the UK in the early 1980's on saturday mornings.
One of these kids is not like the other.... Haha.

It is not wrong to pop bubbles. They're not alive and do not feel. You can feel like it is wrong to pop them, but to think it is wrong to pop them isn't rational.
It seems to be fairly common for autistic people to feel 'empathy' for inanimate objects, though. Somewhere there has been a thread on this before, though I don't remember in which part of the forum. Personally I don't.
I put 'empathy' in quote marks as it isn't really empathy. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another and thus the other has to have feelings for it to be empathy.

It feels like they are alive. I also feel like I would be destroying something someone has made. Like it is vandalism.

It may not be the originally intended purpose, but that doesn't mean it's serving no useful purpose at all...

[Red Dwarf Wiki - Tension Sheet]

There is some truth in the Red Dwarf joke, I think; a lot of people do seem to find popping the bubbles quite stress relieving. I would go as far as saying that it's a kind of tactile stimming for me - a form of re-use by finding a new function for packing that most folks would just throw away rather than vandalism, IMHO.

Yes! I feel the same way. Although chewed up paper products go in the garden.

What I really hate are styrofoam popcorn.

Aww .

I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels bad about popping the bubbles. I prefer the crinkling noise of the plastic over the sound/feel of popping bubbles anyway, and I also like squishing the filled bubbles without popping them.

Mountain Goat, I am with you on this. While I hear everyone saying bubble wrap is inanimate, it has no feelings, etc, it still strikes me as wanton. Rather like killing something simply because you can, because you are bigger. Maybe it has to do with now much some of us were bullied as powerless children by the older kids (I found myself in that scenario more times than was tolerable). It just doesn't sit right with me.

In the 90's there was a lot of sketches explaining the differences between living and non-living objects. There was one where Bert and Ernie built a snowman in a field somewhere, after he's done admiring it Bert wants to go home because he's hungry and cold. Ernie, however, doesn't want to leave the snowman because he thinks the snowman will get cold, hungry, and lonely, and Bert explains, as best as he can, that the snowman can't feel cold or hungry or lonely because he's not alive. But when they both finally start to leave Ernie starts wailing that he can't leave the snowman because he *looks* cold and lonely to him. So Ernie "borrows" Bert's scarf and hat and puts them on the snowman so it'll be warmer. Now Bert is cold and shivering but Ernie is happy and finally starts to head home.