Why bother?

Ever feel like that? Do you ever wake up in the morning and think, no, no, nothing is changing, nothing is getting better, why bother? However, despite those negative feelings, you wake, rise, wipe the sleep out of your eyes, and you plunge into the day. Work, recreation, whatever is on the docket for the day, you dive into, and life goes on. But now and then, life may cause you to ask why bother?

During the day, you have moments of joy and excitement, and the “why bother” question you posed at dawn now seems a million years ago, and you cannot imagine why you even asked. A good cup of coffee, a nice chat with a friend, or a person in the office whose company you enjoy returning from vacation — the day brightens when you see them. In that moment, you’re glad you bothered, right?

It works itself out; something else holds your attention, and the question melts into the day’s hustle, bustle, and lunch. Yes, and all the lunch possibilities that certainly perk you up, and all is well for a bit. Just a rough patch, a bump in the momentum; you move through it, and all is just fine. No worries, stay the course, tomorrow is another day, right? Yes.

Okay, good, moving on.

Hold it. Not so fast. I’m not ready to move on just yet. I woke up this morning and immediately read about the newest AI developments: a focus on agentic workflows where AI systems act as autonomous teammates rather than simple chatbots; native multimodal reasoning models built from scratch by major tech firms like Microsoft; and advanced integrations in healthcare, such as Google testing clinical video consultation tools. Apparently, systems now plan, coordinate, and execute multi-step tasks across platforms autonomously, rather than just giving single answers.

Can you believe this? Can you believe what is happening? Can you possibly believe what we’re doing? I ask because, frankly, I have no idea what all that means. I truly don’t, and maybe I should. However, it is easier after reading stuff like the above and imagining what the future of AI holds just to throw your hands up, say why bother to the heavens, and slip back down beneath the covers. Thank you, good night, and please wake me when it’s 1950 again.

Why Bother

You know, it’s an easy question to ask, and so many of us have probably hit that wall and are asking ourselves, our families, our significant others, and even our dogs, why bother? The dogs don’t mind, not at all. Don’t bother, they say; leave it all behind and let’s go for a walk and have some treats; hell, without all that work you’ll have more time for me, and I can’t be AI-generated. Can I?

A life of walks and treats does sound lovely some mornings. Evenings too, but I, for one, would get tired, and I know many folks who live to work, who would enjoy the dog’s life only for so long before even that would cause them to ask, why bother?

Maybe it’s not a good question. Maybe it’s too depressing to have that in your head. But it’s there now and then, and it may help to think about why and what can be done.

We Bothered

We did. Well, I didn’t, not in the way others have and to the extent they bothered. But we, as a people, have bothered time and time again; we’ve bothered, and sometimes, we forget what all that bother has led to.

This weekend, I did my shopping at Safeway. I fell down when I looked at some grocery prices I know I didn’t need to take a loan out to buy as little as a month ago. Then I recovered, pulled out my shopping list, and off I went. Among the regular items I picked up were toilet paper, half-and-half, and raisins. I also thought I might roast a pork loin this week, so I bought a pineapple to slice and layer on the roast. The pineapple was on sale, and it cost me a couple of bucks to buy it. Easy, right?

Now it is. Now going to the market and buying a pineapple seems effortless, simple, and normal. Did you know that in the 18th century, pineapples were so rare and so unique, such a luxury, that one could cost you anywhere from $8,000 to $23,000, in today’s money? In fact, they were such a status symbol that people often rented one to carry around at a party or to be a much-admired centerpiece. “Oh, Martin, why don’t we rent a pineapple for Charlotte’s wedding, wouldn’t that be lovely next to the cake?” she asks. “Why bother?” he replies. “It’s expensive, and we never get to eat the bloody thing. We’ll never get to taste a pineapple in our lives. Why bother?” So, Charlotte’s wedding is not graced by the presence of the pineapple. Dad didn’t bother, and Charlotte’s wedding went ahead sans pineapple, and no one was the wiser.

Even though Dad didn’t bother and poor Charlotte’s wedding was pineapple-less, someone did bother. Many someones, actually. Wealthy gardeners with a hankerin’ for pineapple on their pizzas built pineries, complex heated structures where they would grow their own pineapples. Someone bothered.

In fact, there are many examples of the abundance of life we encounter every single day, the abundances that have become so ordinary that we’ve ignored how complex and amazing they are. And this abundance came from people who heard the question “Why bother” and said, “Hold my mead.” If you’re interested in a quick overview of our overlooked abundance, check out this little gem.

A sign with I Love You Meh We Go on it

Meh, Why Bother. Still.

Despite streaming networks, music downloads, electric light, and so much more listed in the article above, we still get that feeling. Why bother? It takes some seriously life-changing technology to make us bother. Carriages to cars. Ships to trains and then to airplanes. Folks bothered there. Bow and arrow to AK-47s. TNT to nuclear warheads. Someone bothered.

We are strivers. We strive to improve our lives and the lives of others with our inventions and insights. Our ungodly technical achievements, medical miracles, and scientific discoveries. We strive, and we bother. And when we bother, we achieve. And what we achieve is magnificent. We’ve put a human being on the moon for the love of God. That was an incredible bother, and yet, we did it.

There were those who didn’t think we should bother; they felt that the billions spent on the space program could be better spent on fighting poverty, helping the hungry and poor, you know, Earth-bound priorities. Still, we bothered, and we succeeded.

When we make these strides, conquer new worlds, and develop technology far beyond our imaginations, we enhance life as we know it. Maybe we don’t see it right away; I mean, what did we actually get from putting men on the moon? Well, apart from some serious USA bragging rights, putting men on the moon gave humanity 842 pounds of lunar rocks, revolutionary scientific proof about the solar system’s origins, and thousands of technological spinoffs like digital fly-by-wire, advanced water filters, and earthquake-proofing materials.

Here are some of the things that we gained by bothering to go to the moon:

Scientists knew there was something to be gleaned from creating the technology that let us go there. They had no idea what the outcome would be; they turned a deaf ear to the calls for better spending and people asking, it’s so far away, there’s no air, we can’t grow tomatoes there … why bother?

But they did bother, and now we have so much more because they did.

What am I driving at?

I’m not 100% sure, as you can probably tell by this rather meandering piece. I know that I started writing this piece today because I saw yet another article about what AI can and will do. I lay in bed, reading the news, and thought, it can already write better than me, think better than me, and produce better than me; why bother?

Why bother hauling my fat ass out of bed to sit down in front of a screen and beat myself up mentally in an effort to put something on the screen, when AI can do it without the stress, the self-doubt, and the revisions? Since AI showed up, it’s getting easier for me to ask, why bother?

Because…

If I’m pushed and feeling stable in my day, then I will admit that AI can write something better than I can. It can certainly write cleaner copy than a writer with dyslexia, so I have to give it that. It’s also a lot faster than I am, and when AI is writing, I’m pretty sure it’s not lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling, willing the next paragraph into being. So, yes, in some situations AI can write better than I do. It still cannot write a joke or feel and then translate empathy into the writing, but, still, yes, AI does write better than me.

But is that the standard: it’s better? See, better isn’t and shouldn’t be the reason we do things. Simply put, we don’t cook because restaurants don’t exist. We don’t garden because Safeway has run out of tomatoes. We don’t play guitar because Spotify desperately needs another version of “Stairway to Heaven.” We don’t paint because the world is suffering from a shortage of pictures. We do these things because doing them does something to us.

AI may change a product’s value. It doesn’t necessarily change the value of the process. And that applies beautifully to writing. I don’t only write because the world needs another 1,800 words about branding, AI, pineapples, or whatever strange road I’ve wandered down that morning. I write because the act of wrestling with an idea changes my relationship to the idea. I woke feeling like my job, and thus my life, was pointless because AI can write better than me sometimes. So, I took on that idea and, for the last 1,700 words, I wrestled it. I examined it and took a truthful, somewhat painful look at myself. I learned a little something about myself in this process, and I hope those who read this learn something about themselves as well. I was honest with myself, and I have tried to write this piece from a place of honesty, and the honest truth is, sometimes the reason to bother isn’t what you make. It’s what making it does to you.

The People Who Bother

Let’s go back to all those people who bothered. The person who tried to grow a pineapple in England wasn’t guaranteed success. The engineers working on Apollo weren’t guaranteed that the technology they developed would eventually improve airplanes, food safety, medical equipment, and buildings. They couldn’t see all the consequences of what they were doing. They bothered without knowing what the bothering would produce. That’s important. We tend to judge effort retrospectively. Once something succeeds, the effort seems justified. Of course somebody invented the airplane, somebody developed the computer, and somebody figured out how to get a pineapple from South America into a Safeway in Washington for a couple of bucks. But the person doing the work didn’t have hindsight. They had uncertainty. And they bothered anyway.

Nobody actually knows what all this becomes. Nobody knows exactly what jobs disappear, what new ones emerge, what skills become more valuable, or what humans will decide they simply don’t want machines doing for them. That uncertainty isn’t an argument for giving up. Historically, it’s where bothering begins.

Street sign with a red circle and Turning Point on it

Maybe Bothering Is the Point

Here’s the thing: when we ask “Why bother?” we’re usually asking something slightly different: Will this matter? Will anybody care? Will this work? Will I succeed? Will this still have value five years from now? Will somebody or something else do it better? But bothering has never come with that guarantee.

People write books nobody reads. Businesses launch products nobody buys. Scientists pursue theories that go nowhere. Actors perform for twelve people. Entrepreneurs fail. Artists make terrible paintings. Gardeners grow tomatoes that squirrels eat five minutes before they’re ripe. And yet… We bother. Because a life constructed only around activities with guaranteed outcomes would be an extraordinarily small life.

I have stepped on stage many nights to do a show and realized that the theater that holds 900 people is occupied by only twelve. What did I do? I did the show. I was contracted, and I did the show. I couldn’t say, “Why bother?” because there were butts in the seats. I wouldn’t say why bother, because there were butts in the seats and because every chance to do a show, perform what we had rehearsed, is one that deepens the performance and helps us connect the message to the audience and give them a more significant performance.

I take that show, with its twelve patrons, and I use it for a reason. I will do a word-perfect show tonight; these twelve people are in for a treat. Or I will try something new, take a risk, and push myself further from my comfort zone. Yes, I’ll use the small audience to experiment in front of them, but I won’t give up the show, and I won’t waste the performance. Because in these situations, you’re more relaxed and open to playing. Small house, we could speed through, or we could use it to take the show higher. In that newfound freedom, things get discovered, and you bring those discoveries into the next performance. You bothered, and you’re rewarded.

AI Is Bothering Too

Here’s the funny thing about all of this, and it took me far too long to see it. The very thing making me lie in bed wondering why I should bother is here because an enormous number of people bothered. AI didn’t simply appear one Tuesday afternoon, fully formed and ready to write emails, create images, diagnose problems, answer questions, and make people like me question every career decision they’ve made since high school. People built it. People imagined it, worked on it, failed at it, went back to it, argued about it, improved it, and spent years trying to make something work that, for a very long time, probably seemed impossible to a great many people.

Which makes my reaction to it a little ridiculous. I’m looking at the result of decades of human effort and using it as evidence that human effort no longer matters. I’m considering giving up because somebody else refused to. There’s something wonderfully stupid about that. And I’m nothing if not wonderfully stupid.

The people who began working toward artificial intelligence couldn’t possibly have known exactly where all of this would lead. They couldn’t have known that one day some guy would be lying in bed reading about agentic workflows and multimodal reasoning, understanding almost none of it, and wondering whether he should bother getting up and writing a blog. They bothered without knowing the outcome, just as the people who worked on the space program bothered without knowing every technology that would eventually grow out of getting us to the moon. That seems to be something we humans do rather well. We start. We try. We screw things up. We learn. We try again. Occasionally, after enough people have bothered for long enough, something extraordinary happens.

Maybe that’s the part I was missing this morning. AI isn’t evidence that bothering has become pointless. AI is evidence of what bothering can produce.

And yes, it may change what I do. It probably will. It may change what you do too. Some things we’ve spent years learning may become less valuable. Other things may suddenly matter more. Jobs will change. Industries will change. Businesses will change. There will undoubtedly be things we lose along the way, and pretending otherwise would be foolish. We’re standing in the middle of the uncertainty right now, and nobody knows exactly where all of this is going.

But uncertainty has never been a particularly good reason not to bother. If anything, uncertainty is where bothering has always begun.

Chinese food take away container

The Takeaway

Businesses are asking their own version of the question right now. Why bother writing original content when AI can generate it? Why bother spending weeks thinking about positioning when a machine can give you a hundred possibilities before lunch? Why bother wrestling with strategy, brand, messaging, research, creative concepts, and all the messy conversations that come with them when technology promises to make so much of it faster, cheaper, and easier?

Because faster, cheaper, and easier were never the whole point.

At ThoughtLab, we’re certainly not interested in pretending AI doesn’t exist or that there isn’t enormous value in using it. There is. But producing something has never been the same thing as understanding why you’re producing it. A hundred taglines aren’t a brand strategy. A thousand pieces of content aren’t a point of view. An instant answer isn’t necessarily the right answer. Figuring out what you believe, what makes you different, who you matter to, and what you’re trying to accomplish still requires thought. It requires questions. It requires disagreement, curiosity, judgment, experimentation, and, yes, a fair amount of bothering.

Maybe that’s what I needed to remember when I was lying in bed this morning. I didn’t know where this piece was going when I got up. I didn’t know I’d end up wandering through dogs, Safeway, absurdly expensive pineapples, nuclear warheads, moon landings, AI, and whatever else happened along the way. I just knew there was something bothering me, so I got up, sat down, and started trying to figure out what it was. And somewhere in all that bothering, I found something I didn’t know I was looking for. Why bother? Maybe because sometimes you have to bother before you can possibly know why.