Why do they cry?

Why is Brian overcome with self-pity in this snippet?

And he was, at that moment, almost overcome with self-pity. He was dirty and starving and bitten and hurt and lonely and ugly and afraid and so completely miserable that it was like being in a pit, a dark, deep pit with no way out.

He sat back on the bank and fought crying. Then let it come and cried for perhaps three, four minutes. Long tears, self-pity tears, wasted tears.

Hatchet(2000)

He's crying and overcome with self-pity because he's in a bad situation: dirty, starving, bitten, etc.

We can connect those dots without explicit connecting words.

But we can also swap out the cause for something else and create a completely different scene:

And she was, at that moment, almost overcome with self-pity. She had done a bad TikTok and what she thought would be cool in an ironic normie way was in fact boomer cringe, and she was getting dragged on all major platforms except Discord.

She sat back on the bank and fought crying. Then let it come and cried for perhaps three, four minutes. Long tears, self-pity tears, wasted tears.

And he was, at that moment, almost overcome with self-pity. He had lost the key to his crypto wallet and now his entire fortune was trapped inside a bright orange Lacie hard drive, like an anti-gold brick.

He sat back on the bank and fought crying. Then let it come and cried for perhaps three, four minutes. Long tears, self-pity tears, wasted tears.

You try. Copy this text to the textbox below, and then add your own cause to change the scene:

And he was, at that moment, almost overcome with self-pity. [Add your cause here!]

He sat back on the bank and fought crying. Then let it come and cried for perhaps three, four minutes. Long tears, self-pity tears, wasted tears.

Copy and paste the snippet, then change the cause of the character's self-pity.

Change, cause & effect