Life’s Biggest Questions
The Lifelong Pursuit of Curiosity
👋 Hello friends,
Thank you for joining this week's edition of Brainwaves. I'm Drew Jackson, and today we're exploring:
The Value of Unanswerable Inquiries
Key Question: What was one of the biggest lessons I learned over this summer?
Thesis: Blending my anecdotal experiences, ancient wisdom, and modern science, I’ve identified a key to my future: relentlessly pursuing answers to unanswerable questions. Why seek answers when the true secret is the questions we ask?
Credit ARKA Energy
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Time to Read: 8 minutes.
Let’s dive in!
I almost exclusively read nonfiction books, particularly the ones that most would consider dry and cumbersome. My main genres are philosophy, non-cliche business, self-help, and psychology books.
These are the types of books that you can only read a chapter at a time; they’re not seamless page-turners. It’s not what most people would actively choose to do in their free time, but I really enjoy it.
I’ve realized a common theme throughout my readings: many of these books are written in pursuit of, or describe the historical pursuit of, answering a question or series of questions.
For instance, The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt was written to summarize some of the main ways that the positive psychology field has supplemented ancient and modern thought, particularly in the pursuit of the question “What is the best formula for happiness in our lives?”
In a more straightforward narrative, Susan Wolf’s Meaning in Life and Why It Matters explores two questions: “How can we find meaning in our lives?” and “Why does having meaning in our lives matter?”
These books, among many others, are rigorous creations with the goal of achieving a coherent narrative which ends in one of three results: A) there are no answers to the question, B) there is one answer to the question, and C) there are many answers to the question.
Many of the great figures we talk about in history lessons spent meaningful portions of their lives chasing answers to questions. The Buddha was fascinated with questions relating to human suffering and potential solutions to the problems it creates in our lives. Martin Luther King Jr. dedicated his life to understanding how we can achieve a nonviolent end to racial segregation and injustice in the United States. Isaac Newton was engrossed in the ideas of motion and gravity and wondered how to express them mathematically (culminating in the classic pursuit of the “three-body problem”).
I, too, have spent a portion of my life, albeit a smaller one thus far, in pursuit of answers to some of life’s biggest questions.
Over this last summer, I had the unique opportunity to take some personal time before I started my new job. I traveled to various locations across the United States and spent weeks in relative isolation. During this period, I primarily engaged in the appreciation of nature, tourism in these locations, and, most importantly for our purposes today, deep introspection concerning the questions I was interested in.
In preparation for my national tour, I consulted a wide variety of sources and compiled a list of major questions I was interested in answering.
To begin, I started with the basics—as fundamental as I could get:
Who am I?
Why am I here?
How should I live?
What should I do?
These were answered basking in the glory of the London sun, perfectly positioned on a park bench during a fantastic set of sunny days. It was the perfect atmosphere for deep thought construction.
Now, throughout various activities in my life, I have explored many of these paths briefly before; however, never with the ferocity I approached them with here. My approach was much more rigorous and thought-provoking—nothing was off-limits or unthinkable.
To summarize in hindsight, I would say I came out with many more doubts, uncertainties, and questions than I went into the practice with. Counterintuitively, the basics of life are some of the most complicated aspects.
From there, I began more targeted forays into various aspects of my life, values, conduct, and general thought:
What truly brings me joy, not just fleeting pleasure?
What are my core values? How well do my actions align with them?
What limiting beliefs do I hold about myself and the world?
What am I most grateful for in my life right now?
What past experiences have shaped me into the person I am today?
I encountered these questions during my extended stay on a rural farm in northern Montana. There’s nothing like the smell of animals, the continuous harmony of grunts, and wet licks from overly friendly dogs to inspire introspection.
Of the trifecta, these were probably the easiest to answer (in a relative manner of speaking), as they required the least amount of unabashed soul-searching down into the eerie depths where all manner of gnarly personal problems lie.
And finally, I plunged into the bigger picture surrounding my being and my behavior:
What kind of impact do I want to have on the world?
What does success truly mean to me, beyond societal definitions?
What am I naturally good at, and how can I cultivate those strengths?
What am I avoiding facing in my life?
What am I truly passionate about, even if it seems impractical?
How do I react to criticism, and what does that reveal about me?
What are the stories I tell myself about who I am? Are they serving me?
These questions were answered in the height of southern Colorado heat, on top of a small hill, surrounded by cacti, lizards, and river-surfing nomads.
The surrounding environment wasn’t the most exciting, with various shades of brown and dusky green, very few trees, and generally a slower-paced town. As such, I wrote extensively on these subjects, trying to get to the very bottom of where I currently stood.
Throughout my various journeys to a wide variety of settings, I came to realize what was arguably my most important insight garnered throughout the process, which was an idea I’ve come into contact with before, but haven’t fully appreciated.
The thought was this: potentially, the most important thing in our lives is what questions we’re asking.
Marilee Adams’ famous self-help book is focused entirely on this topic, titled: Change Your Questions, Change Your Life. In it, she explains how the questions we ask shape our thinking and can be the root cause of many of the issues we face throughout our lives, from personal spheres to relational to business and beyond.
One of her biggest points is debunking the traditional problem-solution methodology we all employ. What is the best way to fix a problem? When faced with a problem, almost all of us immediately start looking for the “right” answers.
Instead, she argues, the best way to solve the problem is to first come up with better questions surrounding the issue. In her words, “How can you get the best answers without first asking the best questions?” It isn’t usually the answer that provides the true solution; it’s the question.
A large portion of our waking lives, we’re barely conscious of the questions we and others in our lives ask constantly. In fact, questions are part of our thought process in nearly every moment of our lives. Various sources suggest the average adult makes over 30,000 decisions each day, including what to eat, what to wear, where to go, and many more.
You’re probably aware of this fact. But, you’re probably not cognizant that each of these decisions comes with a question: What should I eat for breakfast? Should I cross the street now?
Thinking naturally occurs as this internal question-and-answer process. This is how we actively process the world around us, through questions and answers, all internally processing rapidly through our various systems.
In Adams’ words, “People typically are not aware of their internal questions or the profound power they exert in shaping and directing their experiences and lives. By changing those questions, one can set in motion a different process leading to a different result.”
Questions beget a learning and curious mindset, which opens us up to future growth opportunities. In her words, “Learning is the strength of strengths, since it’s the one that grows the rest of them.”
To summarize, Adams recommends the following easy-to-implement actions throughout our lives:
“Question everything” - Albert Einstein
Increase the quantity of questions we ask ourselves and others
Focus on having questions work for us instead of against us
The thought is simple: great results begin with great questions; most problems can be solved by asking enough of the right questions; and the questions we ask ourselves often provide the most fruitful openings for new thinking and possibilities.
Packy at Not Boring explains it this way: “The best questions don’t have answers. The point of the question isn’t to find an answer. The best questions are organizing principles, magnets, ways of seeing.”
In his opinion, the most important question we can ask ourselves is “What question am I trying to answer?” This one should have a working hypothesis or an answer at all times. From there, this question provides a path that our lives can follow; our goal should be to find a question so powerful that it can fully shape our lives.
For most of us, there probably exists some question somewhere out there that could impact us like this, and we haven’t spent close to enough time trying to find out what that is.
This year, I’ve had firsthand experiences of this methodology throughout my life. During my time traveling and introspecting, I asked so many questions.
Often, I was presented with answers I hadn’t ever encountered before. You think, after 22 years of being alive and living my life, that I would have a good grasp of what my life entails and the answers it provides to the questions asked of it.
This couldn’t be further from the case. If anything, after this summer, I have many more questions than answers, and I don’t see the trend reversing anytime soon. Once you start asking questions, it’s difficult to stop.
That was a large takeaway for me, and one of the main reasons why I wanted to highlight this topic today. Our questions truly impact our lives in many more ways than we realize. For instance, I’ve been told before that the reason I progressed through the latter rounds of job interviews was that I asked intelligent, unique questions to the interviewer.
In other realms of our lives, our questions influence our self-esteem, our values, beliefs, and even our behavior. Something so fundamental as questioning, as the basic 6 (who, what, where, when, why, and how), can have a profound impression on our lives.
We can live our lives entirely in pursuit of one question, and that’s a fantastic way to live. Pinning this down isn’t easy, but it’s worth every second you give to it.
I think that’s undoubtedly the core message here:
Maybe life isn’t about solutions, maybe it’s all about asking the right questions.
That’s all for today. I’ll be back in your inbox on Saturday with The Saturday Morning Newsletter.
Thanks for reading,
Drew Jackson
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So good.
It's interesting how you focus on questions; such a smart idea, though the iterative pursuit itself often holds the tru insights.