Why do we worry about the shit that occupies our time?
Are you asking 'Why do we do the things we do'? If so I too ask myself this, every day actually and spend a lot of resources on trying to understand. Too many I suspect.
In poetic form:
We multiply diseases for delight,
invent a shameful want, a horrid doubt,
luxuriate in license, feed on night,
make inward bedlam — and will not come out
Why should we? Stripped of subtle complication,
who could regard the sun except with fear?
This is our shelter against contemplation,
our only refuge from the plain and clear.
Who would crawl out from under the obscure
to stand defenseless in the sunny air?
No terror of obliquity so sure
as the most shining terror of despair
to know how simple is our deepest need,
how sharp, and how impossible to feed.
~ Marcia Lee Anderson
In psychological form:
There are a few theories on human motivation. Maslow's is quite useful because it partially explains the ever shifting nature of our focus (
stream of consciousness as William James would say) and attempted to address the observations he made. This was the driver behind his inquiries. He saw this as the fear of standing alone.
Who would crawl out from under the obscure
to stand defenseless in the sunny air?
He used a broad humanistic perspective and existential language with terms like self actualizing ones potential and ones full humanness and saw these as natural developmental urges and wanted to know what blocks them, what holds them up.
“We fear our highest possibilities…We are generally afraid to become that which we glimpse in our most perfect moments, under the most perfect conditions, under the conditions of greatest courage. We enjoy and even thrill to godlike possibilities we see in ourselves in such peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe, and fear before these very same possibilities.†~ The Farther Reaches of Human Nature ~ Abraham Maslow.
Be careful, such lines of inquiry often lead to the abyss. You know you are approaching the precipice when you come to "the worm at the core" as William James would say.