field report no. 0001 · subject: the wanting of whys
species: human · status: ongoing, unexplained
Purpose is weird.
a field report on the strangest known behavior
a brief survey of things that exist
- a photondoes not ask why
- basaltdoes not ask why
- the number sevendoes not ask why
- mossdoes not ask why
- a jellyfishdoes not ask why
- the tidedoes not ask why
- a crowunclear*
- your dogno. but watches you closely
- youyes. constantly. even nowanomaly
* crows hide food and lie about where they hid it. impressive, but still not the same thing.
notes from the field
Nothing else in the inventory does this. Hydrogen burns without wondering what the burning is for. Moss takes the north side of the rock and files no complaints and no questions. The tide has been arriving twice a day for four billion years without once asking whether it should keep going.
Then, somewhere between the basalt and you, matter started demanding a reason for itself. Not food, not warmth, not safety. A reason. A thing no instrument has ever detected out in the field. You cannot weigh a why. You cannot refrigerate one. There is no known deposit of purpose anywhere in the surveyed universe.
And the wanting persists anyway. It survives comfort, survives success, survives every attempt to argue it away. You can feed a person everything and they will still lie awake asking what it was for. On the record, in the plain language a report requires: wanting a why is the strangest thing we do.
interview with the specimen
why do you build things?
because they might help someone.
why?
because helping is one of the few things that obviously counts.
why?
because some things just count.
why?
because... look. it just does.
why?
because if nothing counted, you would have stopped asking by now.
why?
nobody knows. nobody has ever known. every child reaches this floor in about four questions. every philosopher, in about forty years. it is the same floor.
Wanting a why is the strangest thing we do.
Keep doing it.