Why Bother: Discover the Desire for What's Next
Jennifer Louden
Page Two
Nonfiction, Self-Help
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: You're stuck in a job you hate, but putting food on the table is too important to consider a change. You're lonely, but making friends or finding dates takes time, effort, and self-confidence you haven't had in years. You're unhappy, but don't have the time or energy to figure out just why - and even if you did figure out what you wanted, it's probably not something you could do well enough to earn approval from others. Life's just a gray, endless slog from nowhere to nowhere, by way of nowhere. Why bother?
The question "why bother?" isn't just about giving up, throwing your hands in the air and accepting that everything has sucked, does suck, and forever more shall suck. It's also a question that begs an answer. Why should you bother? What is the driving force, the desire, the thing you've lost (or never found) that would make life worth bothering about?
In this book, writer and life coach Jennifer Louden offers anecdotes and advice on how to ask yourself the questions and give yourself permission to figure out the answer to the question "why bother?".
REVIEW: I readily admit that part of the rating is due to timing; I read it during a particularly trying and stuck life phase on multiple levels, personal to international, a phase that doesn't look likely to end any time soon no matter how many probing questions I ask myself or attempts at meditation or journaling I manage.
Objectively, the advice Louden offers is solid enough, if familiar from other books on self-help and getting oneself together. She's not afraid to expose her own missteps and backslides on the way to greater understanding in her own efforts to answer "why bother?" at various stages in her life; it's not a one-and-done proposal, but an ongoing life process that will have different answers at different times. There are also, she acknowledges, circumstances beyond one's control; this is not one of those manifestation/"prosperity" books, where everything wrong in your life can be blamed on just not wishing hard enough for everything to be right. Sometimes all one can do is manage one's reaction to that which cannot be (at the time) controlled, and not every life desire can be fulfilled all at once. Some of the ideas and exercises are more practical than others, particularly to those who can't afford week-long cross-country retreats or personal life coaches. It also skews a little hard into spiritual territory by the end. Louden offers numerous anecdotes and citations throughout, with a bibliography at the end for further research and reading on numerous topics discussed.
In any event, like other self-help titles, more power to those who find help in their pages. Right now, though, through no fault of this book, that person is unlikely to be me.
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