Meditation: Why Bother?

"Simple. Because you are human. And just because of the simple fact  that you are human, you find yourself heir to an inherent unsatisfactoriness in life which simply will not go away. You can suppress it from  your awareness for a time. You can distract yourself for hours on end, but it always comes back--usually when you least expect it. All of a sudden, seemingly out of the blue, you sit up, take stock, and realize your actual situation in life. There you are, and you suddenly realize that you are spending your whole life just barely getting by. You keep up a good front. You manage to make ends meet somehow and look OK from  the outside. But those periods of desperation, those times when you feel everything caving in on you, you keep those to yourself. You are  a mess. And you know it. But you hide it beautifully. Meanwhile, way down under all that you just know there has got be some other way to live, some better way to look at the world, some way to touch life more fully. You click into it by chance now and then. You get a good job. You fall in love. You win the game. And for a while, things are different. Life takes on a richness and clarity that makes all the bad times and hum drum fade away. The whole texture of your experience changes and you say to yourself, "OK, now I've made it; now I will be happy". But then that fades too, like smoke in the wind. You are left with just a memory. That and a vague awareness that some thing is wrong."

Henepola Gunaratana - Mindfulness In Plain English