Why?

A stupid question that I’ve asked on many occasions is “why?”. Simple enough right? You say it at least daily and usually more than that. No one really thinks twice about it, it’s just an automatic response to anything. Some people encourage it because some anonymous person said “curiosity opens doors”. But then there’s others who get annoyed having to come up with an answer to every “why” that you throw at them. Here is a couple reasons why I think “why” is a stupid question.

1. You’re only going to get an answer about 10% of the time. All of the other times you will either get an “I don’t know” or a “that’s just how it is”. There is a reason behind everything so it’s not “just how it is”. My biggest pet peeve in life is asking a question and not getting an answer to it. I understand when you honestly don’t know, but if there is a reason, I want the reason instead of just brushing of the question.
2. Parents feel like they are exempt from ever answering my many “why”s. It’s almost like once you have a child, that question no longer pertains to you and you can just answer with “because I said so”. I understand that you told me to vacuum the floors for a second time today, but why? It doesn’t matter why and we will never honestly know why. The only thing that we will know is that our parents will forever be telling us what to do with no explanation.
3. Out of the 10% of times that you do get an answer, only about 3% of those are true. I am guilty for this one. When people ask me questions, I tend to just throw out an answer regardless if I actually know or not. I don’t think about it at all, I just say whatever comes to my head first. So I know from experience that you can’t really trust people to give you the right answer when asking “why”.

I’m the kind of person who always needs an answer. I need to know the reason something happened or why it has to. Some people get extremely annoyed with all my question, some choose to ignore them, and I definitely have had my fair shares of “that’s just how it is”. “Why” is such a stupid question because you will barely ever get a true answer, but I still continue to ask it just for that 3% of time when it pays off.

Even with all of the times that I do ask, there are still many times where I haven’t. I want to know why parents get divorced, why people are all treated differently, why someone who once meant so much to you could one day mean nothing. I want to know why the world works like it does and why life isn’t fair. There is so much that I want to know, so much knowledge I wish I had, but the truth is that I will never get an answer to all my “why”s.

Photo by e-magic on Foter.com / CC BY-ND