WHY that matters—beyond TL;DR
There is only one WHY question that matters. It is the root of all other WHY questions, including those from the popular leadership maxim: ‘Start with WHY.’ (Simon Sinek wants you to answer that one yourself.) But before we get to a single meaningful answer, there is some work required. Work that those who enjoy it call intellectual delight, while those who dread it decry as burdensome cognitive load. Which camp you are from will be revealed by this text. It’s not what you think that matters…
So, you are still here…reading? WHY? A member of the intellectual delight camp then, not hoi polloi… Before you congratulate yourself, here is the bad news: you’ve now read 123 words and what you came here for is still missing. You might be tempted to skim to the heart of the matter now. Perhaps even go to the last paragraph and read backwards quickly — a useful approach to most online articles.
Why? Because increasingly more and more online content adheres to a formula production as old as movable type and yellow tabloids: hook the reader with a strong lead, pull them into the story with curiosity and lightness, and hit them with a revelation wrapped in a narrative that touches the nerve, then finish with a whimsical pun or prosaic platitude, or even better: with a question. The order of these can be mixed, now and then, to derive the coarsest, commonest pleasures, for the fascinations of the many. When there is constantly so much more to learn and remember, the faster you purge your mind, the more comfortable you become with forgetting.
It doesn’t matter what you find in an online story, as long as you return for another one. The life of every digital publication today (do any other still matter?) hangs by a thread at the mercy of a bored and murderously impatient sultan: today’s audience (not just readers, many increasingly enjoy digital stories without reading a single word; Ray Bradbury was ever so slightly off). You must consume to forget. You must forget to be able to consume. Binge and purge. The mind vomitoria spill into trending hashtags which algorithms consistently predict with increasing accuracy.
Why not have your personal AI assistant synthesize this overwritten piece (you’ve been warned by TL;DR in the title) into an easily digestible three-bullet-point summary? Don’t worry, if you don’t have one yet, soon you will. LaMDA and GPT-3 are coming to harvest the remains of your attention span. In the meantime, why not try googling “the only why question that matters”? As you are opening a new tab grumbling how this could’ve been an embedded link, realize how many struggle to purge themselves if they are not scrolling their favourite feed at the same time. Deciding whether or not such a life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question from which all other questions follow. Shakespeare inspired Camus to add his name to the goblet of fire.
Should you trust anyone asking the question WHY is honest about finding an answer? When the only WHY that really matters is as simple as scrolling ahead to a quick answer for every question your mind will come up with, can this process still be called thinking? And in a world where all answers are available at hand, why would there be a need to ask any questions? As you probe the recesses of your mind (by googling) for the right words to capture the meaning of the only WHY that really matters, you may arrive at a jarring realization best expressed by Ubu Roi: ‘That’s a beautiful speech, but nobody’s listening. Let’s go.’ The search for WHY remains elusive.
What can be said at all can be said clearly, insisted Wittgenstein. He may have also hinted that at some point of inquiry into the meaning behind every WHY: you will struggle to understand if you have not already thought the thoughts which you encounter — or similar thoughts. What Victor Frankl derived from his time at a Nazi concentration camp is that by knowing WHY you can withstand any HOW. The endurance of all transgressions (what is hailed as resilience today) requires the victim’s belief in justification and acceptance of suffering. If you are certain of WHY, how can you claim to be thinking freely, or claim you are thinking at all? Caressing the boulder of your struggle before pushing it up the hill to earn your daily bread you must imagine yourself… happy.
It is impossible to make everything comprehensible to every human being. What lies beyond general comprehension Wittgenstein refused to explain: whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent. This marks the end from which you now have to read everything again backwards. But only if you believe WHY still really matters.
