42 Is the Answer, So What’s the Question?

“What is the meaning of life?” is a really bad question.

It’s like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where superintelligent mice build a supercomputer to discover the meaning of life. It takes millions of years, and it finally gives the answer…

42!

Turns out they never actually asked a question – nobody knows what question 42 is even the answer to – so they have to build another supercomputer, which turns out to be Earth. But then that gets blown up too, to build a super highway, before anyone can find out what the question was in the first place.

Although the Earth hasn’t been blown up, yet, we have the same problem.

Living the Questions and Deeper Nuance

Rainer Maria Rilke, in one of my favorite quotes, tells us to live the questions.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke

You’re trying to figure out how to be, how to do things, how to live — and you don’t know, so the best way to get there is to live into it.

His point is that our biggest questions in life, the most fundamental, visceral ones, aren’t ones we want happy words for. That’s not the medicine we need; we need our life to be changed, we want the life itself to be different.

And if you have the words but you don’t know how to live them, it doesn’t really count for that much.

But in practice, what I find happens as we “live into the questions” is often that, while our lives do slowly change, we also get enough perspective to ask better, clearer, more nuanced questions.

Ones that point us to better thinking and more useful answers.

Why Do We Need Better Thinking?

As writers in the age of AI, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that it is better than we are at explaining most of the “facts” that humans know about. Just repeating info (which has already been repeated a 1000 times) is no longer useful.

It needs your unique take – the journey this idea had to take on the passage through your soul and into real life.

That means deep processing, deeper understanding, application – and thinking.

We need to think better to stay relevant. Because what humans do best is create new things. We jump the tracks and spin five unrelated concepts together and come up with something no one has ever seen before. Something that moves around other people’s lives.

So How Do We Think Better?

According to the authors of How to Read A Book, to really understand a text and pay attention to it, we have to skim it for an overview, and then ask questions of it as we read.

You might ask: What does this header mean and how does it fit into the overall argument? What argument is the writer making here? What is the evidence? How does it fit with other ideas? Is it true?

Likewise, learning to ask and answer questions like this makes us better writers.

Writing often requires us to think from different angles. For example: What’s the conclusion of this idea? What’s the contrast of this idea? What is true because of this idea? What does that mean for other things?

Questioning also helps us build thought experiments. We can say, if this were true from this perspective, in this scenario… What would be true then?

Really, better writing depends on better thinking. And better thinking comes from reading, questioning, taking multiple perspectives, and then trying to figure out the answers – and seeing what new questions those generate.

So asking better, deeper, more nuanced questions helps us share meaning.

But then, life is still the adventure that teaches us what is meaningful in the first place.

The Unquestioned Life

“The unexamined life is not worth living” – Socrates

I cannot talk about questions without thinking about Socrates, who influenced so much of the history of thought because of his habit of sitting around and asking people deep questions… and then trying to come up with answers… and then asking deeper, better questions.

Socrates was ultimately put on trial and executed for ruining the minds of all the kids in Athens with all of his annoying questions.

Which reminds us that people don’t always appreciate what we find when we ask deep questions.

Questions lead us to disagree with social norms and follow the “road not taken.”

Hell, they’re uncomfortable for us too.

Thanks, Uncomfortable Death-Questions

Recently, I’ve spent some time filling out end-of-life paperwork for aging family members, to make sure we have it.

It’s full of questions like: how do you want to die? What form of horrible, debilitating illness would you prefer? How minimal could life be and still be worth living?

But it also highlights questions about what actually makes life worth while.

Is life only worth it cause you can wipe your own butt? Would you be okay with a helper, if you could be with people who love you, even if you couldn’t talk?

How much do you care about your corpse?

And most importantly – when you are looking off the cliff of your own oblivion, are you living well enough today?

If today was the last, are you loving enough, are you decent and kind? Do you take time to watch the sunrise and smell the tea and feel the breeze on your skin?

Don’t Ask “What’s the Meaning of Life?”

42 is a terrible answer to a question that never made sense. Instead, ask things like:

• “What creates meaning for me, and how can I make more of it?”

• “What elements have been present in prior meaningful experiences?”

• “What in my life brought me the most peace/joy/connection today?”

• “If I was going to be crippled next year, what would matter most right now?”

And if the world was going to be blown up in 20 minutes… what would you do differently?