On Questions
Or, how to ask better ones
Lately I’ve been thinking about questions— and, naturally, their answers.
I recently took a small break from reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.
This isn’t meant as an intellectual flex; it’s simply an admission that reading Nietzsche straight through is… a lot.
Nihilism has never been my strong suit.
So I dipped instead into Stephen King’s newest collection, You Like It Darker.
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A Shift Toward Fiction
My reading rhythm usually alternates between fiction and nonfiction, but maybe it’s just the season—I’ve been gravitating to fiction more than usual.
Maybe it’s an avoidance strategy.
Maybe it’s a way to find some calm in a chaotic world.
Maybe it’s both.
Still, good fiction always makes me think.
And if you’re a fan of Stephen King, you’ve likely noticed that much of his work over the past two decades has grown deeper—shaped, in part, by his own near-fatal accident. His writing has become more reflective, more human, more attuned to the internal lives of his characters.
In this latest collection there’s a wonderful story called “The Answer Man.”
Without giving too much away, it strikes a Rod Serling-like balance of whimsy and poignancy as it leans into the oldest question in the book:
“What lies before me?”
And it explores something quietly profound:
the difference between important questions and impotent ones.
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Impotent Questions
Impotent questions are easy, surface-level, and often unnecessary:
What should I wear?
What should I eat?
Should I take this job or that one?
When is enough, enough [of anything, really] ?
These questions feel important, but they lack depth.
They often don’t move the trajectory of a life.
They don’t challenge us.
Mostly, they help us stay the same.
Newton said it best: “Objects at rest stay at rest.”
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Important Questions
Important questions confront our finite place in this grand experiment of being alive:
Am I happy?
What am I avoiding?
What does real change look like in my life?
How can I achieve the fullness of my potential?
I believe the reason we don’t ask these questions is simple:
We don’t actually want the answers.
It’s like the age-old inquiry: Is there intelligent life out in the stars?
If we knew—really knew—the answer, one way or the other, the world would plunge into chaos.
Vice, wantonness, bacchanalia and dissolution.
Because collectively, we lack the emotional maturity to absorb truths of that magnitude.
Stephen King captures this tension beautifully in the short story “Two Talented Bastids,” where a visiting alien, reflecting on Earth’s likely demise, delivers the somber line:
“When intelligence outraces emotional stability, it’s always just a matter of time.”
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Asking Better Questions
We are intelligent creatures.
In the span of a single lifetime, we’ve split the atom, reached beyond our atmosphere, and collapsed an entire universe of knowledge into a glowing rectangle that fits in the palm of a hand.
But are we any wiser for it?
We still quarrel and claw for resources.
We armor ourselves against vulnerability.
We tremble at the thought of loving—and being loved—without condition.
The questions that matter most are the ones we hesitate to face, because they are ancient, unyielding, and always profound in the revelation which accompanies them:
Why do I struggle to see myself in those who are different from me?
What keeps me from extending compassion to those I call enemies?
How do I return to steadiness when life moves beyond my control?
These are the questions that bend the arc of a life.
These are the questions that shape a world.
These are the important ones.
Let us not delay in asking them of ourselves.