Life & Wisdom Quote by Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens turns self-pity into a punchline, and the joke lands because it refuses the one consolation people keep begging the universe to provide: a reason. “Why me?” is framed as a “dumb question” not because pain is trivial, but because the question smuggles in an assumption of cosmic bookkeeping - that suffering must be assigned, justified, or earned. Hitchens, the professional atheist and professional contrarian, yanks that premise out by the roots. The cosmos “barely bothers” to respond, a sly bit of personification that’s really an insult: you’re not important enough for the stars to draft a memo.

The reply “Why not” is devastatingly efficient. It’s not nihilism for its own sake; it’s anti-narcissism. Hitchens is puncturing the instinct to treat misfortune as a personal summons from the universe, a moral referendum on your character, or (worse) a backhanded sign of chosenness. The rhythm matters: a petulant human question meets a bored, laconic answer. That tonal mismatch is the point. It mocks the melodrama of exceptionalism.

Context sharpens the edge. Late in life Hitchens wrote and spoke about illness without sentimentality, refusing the redemptive scripts that culture offers the sick: everything happens for a reason, cancer as a lesson, suffering as spiritual upgrade. “Why not” is a kind of brutal egalitarianism. Bad luck doesn’t discriminate; it just arrives. The subtext is freedom: if the cosmos isn’t making a case against you, you’re spared the duty to make a case for it.