The change everything (or at least change one big thing) challenge is approaching an end. Could have been the SeptemberJanuary challenge spearheaded by Jon Acuff and reinforced by Cal Newport. Could have been some commitment app you signed up for where you wager actual money on personal progress towards a goal you are looking to achieve but needed skin in the game to get it going.
But at some point during the challenge, at some point in the reinvention, a dreaded phrase steals away our attention from the goal at hand:
Why bother. A swear word phrase birthed from the greatest nihilists to live among us.
It’s not good.
I figured out a couple things about ‘why bother.’
One is its relationship to inertia. Why-bother is found at the root of inertia, or the inverse of inertia.
If I don’t do one thing, I won’t do the next.
But then why-bother gets much more exponential than linear. And this can apply in the opposite direction of course.
If I do one thing (clean the kitchen, fix the curtain rod, tidy up the laundry room) I then move onto the garage or the living room. I then can write. I then can read. I then can play guitar. Etc.
The other lesson why-bother delivers is cloaked by semi-productive people who don’t want you to achieve your own dreams. I’ll unpack.
Because they themselves have not achieved, or even attempted, what you are embarking on, they will try and cut you down at the root as fast as possible. As soon as your goal reaches their ear canal after you verbalize it to them, their gears are already turning about how they will cut you down. They have to respond by cutting you in half. They have to throw up the defense wall as soon a possible.
If you give a sign or a hint of excitement in your goal statement and exude a confidence you are going to set off posthaste to accomplish X goal, they are going to set fire to your attempt right there on the spot with everything they can muster.
And this is a person, who, mind you, is semi-productive. I qualify this because it’s a person you are expressing your dream, your goal to who seems normative, seems like they have achieved something in their life, or simply seems like a good person to get advice from.
But they’ve internalized a massive ‘why-bother’ inside themselves for years. It might not be the same topic or goal either, but if your goal is a similar unrealized goal for them, it adds several gallons of fuel to the fire they are starting. Regardless, they themselves haven’t processed fully the thing they dreamed about but didn’t do, so you can’t go about doing your thing either.
Want to own a gym and become a personal fitness trainer even though you’re an accounted right now? ‘Bollocks to that idea’ they’ll say, ‘people don’t own gyms [what a bizarre lie, people do own gyms]!’
Want to write and record music all of a sudden? Too bad, you have insurance plans to shop, 401K strategies to figure out, and taxes to file.
None of the above rebuttals seem related to their inquiries, but it’s usually how it goes. You want to pursue X goal, you know you have it in you and have the scaffolding, but someone unleashes their gigantic WHY BOTHER on you instead of either encouragement, constructive criticism, or clarifying questions.
What you’ve just experienced is an attempt at stopping you from starting, advancing, excelling.
But we can do this to ourselves as well. Carrying around a why-bother here or there for things that matter, for things of purpose, for things of duty and responsibility in our lives can’t be contained. It will bleed out and spill over into other areas of our lives, even areas we are so-called passionate about. Or we become the same person described above and stop someone in their tracks when they reveal an ambitious goal to us.
The best reply to a why-bother coming externally or internally is the inertia step. Bothering just enough you get one thing done. Then the next. And so on.
Why bother dissipates when it comes in contact with action, even if it’s muddled stumbling action.
You’ll learn from even the stumbling so you can bother some more with the big goal you are embarking on that someone else wants to put a halt to.
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