Questions and Answers
I was listening to Werner Erhard speak the other day.
Or rather, half listening.
That always happens to me with certain thinkers. I stop the recording every few minutes because my own thoughts begin branching off somewhere else. McLuhan supposedly read books like that. One paragraph would trigger an entire chain reaction and the book itself almost became secondary.
Something similar happened here.
Erhard was talking about answers and questions. I’m paraphrasing badly now, but the basic feeling was this: people are obsessed with finding answers because answers create closure. They stabilize the world. They reduce uncertainty.
And I suddenly realized how much of my own life operates that way.
Not only professionally as a social worker in Switzerland, where everybody wants certainty all the time.
Clients want the answer. Superiors want the answer. Institutions want the answer.
What is the correct intervention? What is the proper strategy? What is the best framework?
But I noticed the same machinery operating quietly inside my private life too.
What is the right way to raise a teenager as a single parent? What is the correct pedagogical way?
What is the right life for me? What is the optimal routine? What kind of books should I read?
Modern life increasingly trains us to experience existence as a sequence of optimization problems.
There is always a hidden assumption underneath: somewhere there must be a correct configuration.
The correct self. The correct method. The correct answer.
And once you find it, uncertainty will finally disappear.
But I started wondering whether many of these questions are already distorted before any answer even arrives.
Take parenting.
“What is the correct parenting style for a teenager?” sounds intelligent at first. Responsible, even.
But hidden inside the question is the fantasy that raising a child is primarily a technical problem awaiting proper calibration.
The question already narrows reality before life even enters the room.
Then another question appeared almost on its own:
What kind of human being do I hope my daughter becomes?
That question feels completely different.
Suddenly the mind moves toward courage, kindness, resilience, honesty, independence, humor, dignity, curiosity.
Not technique. Orientation.
And strangely, the second question also changes the parent asking it.
The question beneath the question is often this:
What am I trying to control right now?
Because the frantic search for optimization is often not curiosity.
It is anxiety trying to feel intelligent.
And beneath that anxiety often sits something even more fragile: the continuous effort to stabilize an identity.
To become a certain kind of person. To avoid becoming another kind. To maintain coherence. To keep the story of oneself intact.
Modern life quietly turns identity into a permanent maintenance project.
But perhaps beneath even that sits something deeper still:
the terror of groundlessness.
The possibility that there is no final configuration waiting to be discovered. No permanent ground underneath the endless optimization. No stable identity that can finally secure itself once and for all.
That may be why people cling so tightly to answers.
Answers create temporary footing.
A philosophy. A diagnosis. A political tribe. A spiritual framework. A lifestyle. A routine. An identity.
Stand here. Believe this. Become this.
Open questions are frightening because they remove the floor beneath you.
Not intellectually. Existentially.
A truly open question leaves a person temporarily unsupported.
And perhaps that is why certain thinkers provoke such strange resistance. Not because they offer unusual ideas, but because they quietly dissolve the psychological ground people were standing on, then refuse to hand them a replacement.
I suspect this applies to much more than parenting.
A large part of modern anxiety may come from asking frightened questions.
How do I avoid failure? How do I avoid suffering? How do I guarantee success? How do I make sure nothing goes wrong? How do I optimize myself correctly?
Those questions tighten consciousness immediately. They reduce life into management.
But there are other kinds of questions.
What is worth becoming? What makes a life feel real? What kind of presence do I bring into a room? What do I actually admire in another human being? What remains when performance stops?
Those questions do not produce quick answers. They do something more unsettling.
They keep perception open.
Open questions exhaust modern institutions.
Social work, medicine, education, bureaucracy. They all depend on protocols. Protocols require closed questions.
Is the problem present? Does the client meet the criteria? Was the intervention effective? Has the outcome improved?
But the human being sitting in front of you often requires a different kind of question entirely.
Not: What category fits this person?
But: What is this person actually reaching for? What kind of life is trying to emerge here? What would allow this person to stand more fully in reality?
Closed questions stabilize systems.
Open questions keep human beings alive.
And maybe the real question underneath it all isn’t: Who am I?
But:
Can I remain here, present, without having everything figured out?