Why Bother?

"At the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe."

We are the fruit from the flower from the tree. We start underripe, become ripe, soften, wrinkle then rot and smell. We have a shelf-life – a sweet one.

I will take you on a journey. Inside of yourself. To look at the meaning of life question. By the end you will know more about yourself than ever before. You will discover what drives you. You will see what drives you to do great things and what drives you to do simple small things. What drives you day in day out, no matter who you are. There are drives, deeply rooted inside all of us. These drives are in everyone, including your next-door neighbour, and the famous people and the rich people and the poor people and you, whoever you are. Knowledge is power say some. Knowledge is helpful is it not? Understanding you and why you want to do things is very useful knowledge.

What sparks your enthusiasm to go out and do something. What aids your enjoyment of things? Certain drives encourage you to buy certain things. These drives encourage you to give to others. These drives encourage you to help others. Drives are connected to favours, fortune and frivolity. Why do you make such an effort to travel. What makes you so keen to visit someone? Why are most of us so keen to make new friends and meet new people. Lots of whys and an underlying reason for them all. Today is another fine day, another day older and perhaps another day wiser. Understanding the drives within you will make you wiser for sure.

Answering the question of what drives us helps us answer that notable question, namely what is the meaning of life? Certain drives give us meaning. Certain drives give us purpose. Many fine texts leave you a little underwhelmed. The answers various people put forward in regard the meaning of life are usually good, but never great. Some people fudge their answers to big questions like this. Some leave you with more questions than you started with. Some answers are hazy, and many are incomplete. There is a good reason why you bother at the end of the hard-earned day. There are things that help you keep the belief. Life can be hard at times. Life can be fantastic. Life can be a struggle. Life can roll along nicely. Whatever situation you are in, you are free to sit and contemplate. During periods of contemplation, we often ask why we bother.

Why do we bother? It is obvious that we may want to survive. We may want to travel, have fun, and explore. We may want to make more money and have a better life. There can be a strong desire to have children. We may wish to master things. We endeavour to learn and succeed. We can strive for power. We may aim to keep ourselves healthy and happy. We can hope for better. Some wise ones simply plod on with no thought as to why. Others spend an age pondering, what it is all for.

Whatever we seek, it all comes down to three words. Three drives. Three things in each and every one of us. These three things provide us the impetus to get up and do. These three things are at the heart of all our motives. We use these three drives all day, every day. When you fully understand them, you will see your life in an entirely different way.

I will go through these drives one by one, giving you everyday examples to help you get to grips with what I am saying. Nothing too taxing as such, but you need to spend a while thinking about them. To really appreciate the importance of this you must watch them in action in your own head. This is a revolutionary way of looking at humans and their desires.

Consider your sex drive. The sex drive stems from base drives. Our sex drive fans out, spreading into a plethora of desires. We may be drawn towards people of a certain colour, people of a certain size, or people of the same gender. We may like sex in certain places or sex with more than one person at a time. We may be content with sex on our own. Sexual activities vary but the underlying drives willing us, pushing us, drawing us towards various forms of sex is a constant. The sex drive is underpinned by more basic drives. There are things that make it satisfying and will us to explore it. You may have a considerable sex drive or none whatsoever. Those with a lower sex drive will have some other activity that stands in place of it. Whilst you may intensely crave sexual liaisons, someone else may get equal pleasure from eating a bar of chocolate. Chocolate can be better than sex for some. It hits the same spots. It satisfies the same core drives.

These drives rarely work in isolation, they are intertwined with each other. When you appreciate the effect of these drives you begin to see them at work in every aspect of our lives. You begin to understand why you did what you did and maybe why you reacted in a certain way at certain times. You will understand your mistakes and see why you succeeded. Everything changes when you understand the drives. Things begin to make sense.

Our drives act as a layer, a special layer that sits between our biology and psychology. When you appreciate the workings of this layer, you can see how basic drives influence all aspects of our psychology. The wish to solve a problem in psychology involves the basic drives. These drives act on us from birth until death. A baby looks for a toy to play with, an adult toys with the idea of obtaining things to make life better. Both toddlers and adults search for things. Both toddlers and adults explore their surroundings, paying greater attention to things that intrigue them.

Life takes a linear course. We are born, as you well know. We develop. We grow, we learn and survive. One way or another we end at the end regardless of what we do in between. No matter what you achieve you won’t be here forever. There may be plenty of friends, acquaintances, and those in the spotlight that achieve more than most, but they die too. We may strive to accomplish lots of things in the timeframe given to us. Some of those things will seem to have a higher purpose. You might look back and think that you could have done more in your life. You might look back and believe that you struck the perfect balance between time spent creating/building and time spent enjoying frivolities. The wish to achieve things relating to a higher purpose is rooted in the basic drives. Some of us search for meaning. Ironically, this search also stems from our basic drives.

This understanding of these drives will be fruitful to all. You may have half-known about these drives already. Now you have a chance to get to understand them fully. They say knowledge is power. It is, and sometimes knowledge is more than that. I am sure many of you will have said to yourself, “If only I had known that when I was younger”. Knowledge makes a significant difference to how we get through life and yet all of us could have spent time to save time. Instead of taking the time to learn powerful things we waste time on time wasters. It can be a challenge to determine who is worth listening to though. Understanding the drives may help a little in this regard. You will see why you were seduced by time wasters. You will grasp their motives.

There are things we find out and things we never find out. We die not knowing. This doesn’t matter. Not at all – not in the grand scheme of things. Luck, chance, and fortune can alter what we discover. We gain awareness. I am not talking about anything deep or complex necessarily. It can be simple things, ordinary things. Nobody learns all there is to know. What we do learn in regards useful knowledge is miserly. We probably learn just enough to feel satisfied that we found out enough to make the best of it. Those that learn ten times as much as you will die too. They will die not knowing many things. Much of what they didn’t discover would have been irrelevant anyway, but some things they could have learnt would have had an impact on their lives.

Knowledge of how to use a tool. Knowing that a tool exists. Knowing dates of certain events, the timeline. The cause and the effect. Academia. Knowledge takes many forms. Knowing that someone liked you. Knowing that someone would have given you something. Lots of things that you know about or are never aware of. There are many forms of ignorance, unawareness. Sometimes this ignorance is a result of stupidity, but usually not.

Knowing certain things enables us to do, to try, to explore in different places. Had we known about these things before, our life would be very different. I didn’t realise she fancied me. I didn’t know they were looking for someone for that job. I didn’t realise that place existed. I didn’t know that could be done. Lots of things that we are aware of or not. It only matters if you find out later. It can be galling if you find out too late.