Why bother?

I knew that winter can do terrible things to somebody's mind, but never to this point...

Today when I woke up I almost felt like to end it all.

Mom insisted on going out on a walk with me. I didn't want to.
Because I am not in the mood for talking. And when you are not alone,
even when it's just with your own family, it's rude to stay silent.
It's like you deny the other persons' existence and they all hate it.
So I said no, please, I would go out, but could you please not come
with me. She did not agree. Then I just begged her to not talk to me at
all. She seemed confused. But she said Ok. Then we walked by the river.
She walked. I ran.

When we were on our way back, I kept on staring at the ice layer
upon the river. Maybe something struck me a long time ago and I've just
realized it, or it was a blow lauched precisely at that moment. I
yelled out: why bother?

What?!

Yes, you've heard it right. Why bother? All this work, aspiration,
energy, all the glossy magazines, big bucks, food, shitty weather,
welfare, holidays, school, relationships, communication, blogs, movies,
music, hair colors, teeth whitening products... We all know, well, kind
of, that they amount to nothing. So why bother?

She grew agitated and tried to pull me back to the normal side of
human psyche, in vain. Then she became weird too and yelled back at me.
She said she lived to make her own existence worthwhile and to make her
family happy, even though she's really got nothing and she doesn't give
a damn and she doesn't know the answer and nobody knows the answer and
then she told me to quit it.

I cried a little and the tears dried on my face, pulling in the skin that they touched.

Then I said to myself that I know better than this. I will just
take a shower as soon as I get home and find the answer to my question
on Internet.

And that's exactly what I did and I would now paste the answer which I think is quite reasonable.

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anti-alias	17 Oct 05 20:50 Post #11
Homo sapiens Group: Member Posts: 5,270 Joined: 5 Sep 2003 From: Bonn, Germany Member No.: 3,147	The simple explanation to 'why bother' is, that its part of our inherited makeup to have this drive to 'bother' (i.e. the will to survive). Think about it: Organisms that don't exhibit this drive don't breed - only the ones who bother go on, so this must have been the absolute earliest trait to get passed down in one way or another. Your friend is a perfect example of what an easy life can do to an organism - they just don't bother anymore because they are not in a state of decision about life and death every second of their lives. If he feels that he is an individual in which that particular 'drive-gene' has been mutated to not be active then there is pretty little you can (and should) do. If that is the case then he is a non-viable mutation. Apart from all this such an ennui with life is quite common in adolescents. It is still a time when one strives for absolutes in everything (absolute meaning, absolute duration, absolute ideals to cling to) the way we do as small children when we copy our parents. Then we try to establish absolute scales of value by using others' behaviour as models. Your friend is at the critical stage where he realizes that others' actions are worth no more (and no less) than his own. Absolutism breaks down for him and he needs to replace it with something. It seems he is loath to give up the childish idea of absolutes in order to settle for the more real aspects of 'life (everything) is relative'. Some make this jump in understanding, others never do (and become nihilists/depressed or take up religion which handily provides these absolutes so people don't have to develop mentally beyond this point) Life is what you make of it. If you want to bother then there is noone that can give you a reason to. You have to give one to yourself and pretend that this is the absolute goal to strive for. This consensory illusion of 'self-defined absoulte meaning' is akin to the consensory illusion of free will (in which we must make ourselves believe that we have it in spite of all the evidence to the contrary - yet without that illusion we cannot go on living, so it is essential that we buy into it). This post has been edited by anti-alias: 17 Oct 05 20:56

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Thank you for your patience and let's hope that I make it to the next entry.

I won't do anything stupid unless I've seen my final grades, so that makes a one-week wait.

With Love.

OO

This is the original thread, go take a peek if you want to:
http://forum.darwinawards.com/index.php?showtopic=6985

P.S.
oh yeah... those Germans are really persuasive