The Bothering Species

Last year I read Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby and stumbled over a paragraph that seems to tell us something important about human nature.

“She wondered why someone would bother to do that; but then, ‘Why bother’ was never a question you could ask about more or less anything on the internet, otherwise the whole lot shrivelled to a candyfloss nothing. Why had she bothered? Why does anybody? She was for bothering, on the whole; in which case thank you ... everybody else, on every other website” Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked (London: Penguin, 2010) 44.

Are they not, indeed, impressive – all the things we do on the Internet every day? How we do bother all the time. How we think it is important to tell others about how we feel and what we think about more or less everything. We do not only show this kind of behavior on the internet, of course, but there it is blatantly clear that we do not have to do it. Even if someone is writing an e-mail to us or posting a commentary on our blog, we could simply turn off the computer. It is easier to ignore an electronic sign than a question or assertion that is made face to face.

So why do we bother so intensively? It must be because we are so deeply a social and communicative species that we actually live in the realities we create through our communication. Once we stopped bothering about them, they would crumble and leave us with nothing. As we cannot create these realities on our own (after all, communication is at least a two-way street) we desperately need someone else’s feedback. This is why we bother, because we have no other chance to survive.

Even people who seem to have stopped bothering and live callous lives, bother to a certain extent. At least they take a stance toward the created realities and condemn them as not worth engaging in. Thereby, they create an anti-reality for which they want encouragement in so far that they tell you how they do not bother. Can anyone be alive without bothering at all? I really do not think that is possible.