You're Only as Good as the Questions You Ask
On awakening to life's truth through the exploration of a question
Each month, we tackle a different theme on how to live what the ancient philosophers called the “good life”—a life in the pursuit of becoming the best version of oneself.
For the month of February, we’ve been focusing on the themes of reason and rationality. You can find links to the series at the bottom of this article.
This Week at a Glance:
Every day life demands a lot of our attention. It is natural therefore for us to focus on ourselves and put ourselves at the center of our point of view of the world. But by doing so, and by not looking at the depth that life requires, we miss the true picture of reality.
This week we explore how to escape the trap of this mindset and learn to harness curiosity to drive reason and rationality.
By the time you finish this meditation, you’ll learn:
🍭 How to recognize what Albert Camus called the “mechanical life”;
🍬 Learn how to break free of mechanical living through a simple question;
🍫 Live a life of meaning and wonder based within curiosity.
David Foster Wallace opened his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College retelling a famous proverb of two fish going about their day when an older fish swims by and says:
“Morning, boys. How’s the water?”
And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes
“What the hell is water?”1
What follows is Wallace’s “capital T truth” about the ordinary life, the things no one talks about, the stuff we miss, or choose not to consider, because we are enveloped in our own world—on autopilot—focused on just getting through the task at hand.
And this is not a ‘you’ thing or a ‘me’ thing but a collective ‘we’ thing—we all do this. We all, according to Wallace, forego the most important realities of life to focus on our own perspective of our experience.
The existentialist philosopher Albert Camus called this type of living, this day-in, day-out life of no reflection, of mendacity, “mechanical living.”2
“Rising, tram, four hours in the office or factory, meal, tram, four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, according to the same rhythm – this path is easily followed most of the time.
Camus believed that for many of us we live on the surface of existence. We’re thrown about by events and routine, by emotions, by life’s decisions but we never truly are aware of life itself.
Camus refers to the moment when life’s veil seems to be lifted and we’re suddenly plunged into the reality of the world around us, our “awakening.”
And according to him, it all starts with a single question:
“But one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.”3
‘Why’
We’re only as good as the questions we ask, and the most important question we can ask at any given time is why. We “awaken” to the world, or as Wallace states, become “conscious”, when we begin to look past the self, past the dogmatic beliefs we hold, past the daily routine and instead, ask the simple question of why.
Why did I react the way I did to that email?
Why did the stock market move the way it did?
Why aren’t more people compelled to take action on this issue?
If we believe our knowledge is set, that we know everything there is to know about the life we are living, if we walk around with hubris on our shoulders, then it is only a matter of time before we are in the mechanical life—worse, some of us grow up never thinking for ourselves and the mechanical life is the only existence we know.
Life is so deep, so intricate, filled with so much wonder and amazement that when we refuse to see it for its truths and instead see it how we want to, we miss reality. When we refuse to see the world and how much depth is within it, we limit our beliefs and see it through thick bifocals—the image there but not as clear and precise as the world has to show.
The Hollywood film and television producer Brian Grazer who has produced such films as Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, and Liar Liar has said that “curiosity is the spark that starts a flirtation.”4
The question ‘why’ drives us to that curiosity and our interest then leads us to the flirtation. It is within this flirtation that we begin to grow, that we expand our worldview, that we decide there are bigger things—deeper things, than what we know.
When we are engaged in life, when we remove ourselves from autopilot and attempt to understand the world around us, we are uplifted from the most basic of life’s experiences and instead are transported into a world of wonder and awe.
As Albert Einstein once stated:
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and science.”5
Questions act as our companion in life, they are our accountability partners, always forcing us to look deeper.
They are, in essence, the the mirror to not only the self, but the world in which the self inhabits.
One becomes a better questioner by first being open to questioning themselves and life. A scientist always questions their hypothesis. A skeptic always questions the reality they know. Life’s knowledge is not static but fluid, ever-growing as new information becomes available and is tested against history and our previously held beliefs or assumptions.
In order to properly “awaken” to life, we must become the scientists of our own existence.
“I don’t know anything,” the famed physicist Richard Feynman once stated in a 1979 interview, “but I do know that everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”6
How do we go about this? About finding interest in something? Feynman has a simple answer:
“It cannot interest you until you deeply understand the problem and its intricacies. Then every subject is interesting.”7
When we do this, when we spend the time to drill down, to learn, to want to know how the nuts and bolts work, that is how we begin to truly gather knowledge, to change our beliefs, to see the true beauty and depth of it all.
And it all starts with the questions we ask. With a ‘why?’ With a ‘how?’ With a ‘what would happen if…?’
It is up to us. We can choose to stay ignorant to the world or we can view it as being an ever-endless chasm of possibility, of knowledge.
The more we know, the more rational we become. The better we become at asking questions, at investigating what interests us, what works and doesn’t, the deeper layers of life we see.
And suddenly, The world gets an upgrade.
Our beliefs change. Our decision-making process gets updated. The choices we see are now different, grander, more filled out with newly acquired knowledge. They now have a sense of endless possibility about them.
If you don’t stop to acknowledge the roses, to see their true existence, then you never have a chance to truly smell them.
And it all starts with a question.
Because we're only as good as the last question we asked ourselves. We can only properly see the world if we continue to promote curiosity and a desire to investigate truth further, to better understand the world, to see it for all its beauty and complex intricacies. It is from this depth, these complicated levers that move the world around us that we continue our quest of knowledge, that we release ourselves from the mechanical life, that we, as Wallace said, keep “the truth up front in daily consciousness.”8
If we refuse to take up this task, if we reject the curious life, if we choose to instead live with this veil of an existence, then we run the risk of never updating our thinking. We choose instead to remain in Plato’s cave, to see the shadows of reality.9 By doing so, we hinder our rationality and reasoning abilities, we fall prey to dogmatic beliefs, and we close off our minds from experiencing true knowledge.
“If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is,” states Wallace, “and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options.”10
3-Bullet Summary:
We live in a world that sweeps us along and often prevents us from viewing the world outside of ourselves, as such, we live a “mechanical life”;
We first break free from the mechanical life by becoming aware of it and building a sense of awareness into our everyday existence through the question of why;
By utilizing why and expanding our world view through curiosity, we are better able to escape a mechanical life and live one that truly embraces the depth and beauty of our existence.
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Each month, we tackle a different theme on how to live what the ancients called the “good life”—a life in the pursuit of becoming the best version of oneself.
For the month of February, we’ve been focusing on the theme of reason and rationality through our Monday Meditations (MM), Wednesday Wisdoms (WW), and Friday Sweet Bites (SB).
Here are the topics covered so far if you wish to catch up:
If this or any of my other work has resonated, please consider upgrading to a paid membership (it’s less than a cup of coffee per week, and sweeter).
Until next week,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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David Foster Wallace, This is Water
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
ibid.
Brian Grazer, A Curious Mind
Richard Feynman, The Quotable Feynman
ibid.
David Foster Wallace, This is Water
Plato, The Republic
David Foster Wallace, This is Water