What lands on the neighbours

A shop on a residential street in Sharjah puts up a new sign. It is bright, it is cheap to run, and it works: people notice the shop from the end of the road. It also shines straight into the bedrooms of the flats across the street until two in the morning. Is that the shop's problem?

Questions like that turn up everywhere once you start looking.

An online seller saves a little on every order by wrapping it in thin plastic that tears and blows away. Somewhere out past the city, a stretch of sand collects it. Who pays for that, and should the seller?

A promise of delivery in under half an hour wins customers. It also sends a rider through traffic faster than is safe. The customer did not ask for that risk. Neither, really, did the rider.

A game is built so that a teenager keeps playing well past midnight. It is legal. The parents did not choose it. Is legal enough?

A rented generator hums all weekend outside a pop-up market, and the family behind the wall cannot sleep. The market is a lovely thing for the neighbourhood. Is it lovely for them?

None of these has a neat answer. Some of the costs are small and some are not. Some are slow, felt by people far away or years later, which makes them easier still to ignore. Almost all of them begin as a decision someone made for sensible reasons, with the bill arriving at the door of someone who was never asked.

I do not think marketing gets to stand outside this. Every promise, every parcel, every clever pull on attention lands on somebody.

Hard questions, most of them without answers. Asking them anyway is part of the job.