I do feel like there are more answers out there today than ever. That’s mostly convenient. But it can also lead to information overload, or worse, the end of curiosity. Unless you use new information to ask better questions the journey might end when you find “the answer”, especially when someone or something with authority tells you how it is.

Easy answers tend to kill curiosity, just like discovering how a magic trick is done. It loses its spark. But time has a habit of proving ‘facts’ wrong, which is reason enough to keep questioning even the things that seem settled.

Questions are a conduit for meaning, the struggle of finding an answer to a question without a clear answer is what keeps people invested in their career or in their pursuits. Ian Leslie in his book “Curious” makes a useful distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Puzzles have a solution, mysteries have no clear answer and might have different theories battling out for being the most credible. Mysteries lead to long journeys with followup questions without a clear end and puzzles end as soon as they are solved.

Sometimes I ask myself, “What am I meant to do, really?” and as much as I want guidance and an answer, maybe it is for the best that there isn’t a definitive answer. I would feel much more powerless if my future was already decided for me, if there was nothing to learn and nothing novel to gain.

Maybe we’re drawn to mysteries because we’re part of them. The struggle, the uncertainty, the slow accumulation of meaning. That’s what the author Warren Berger calls a Beautiful Question. Not one with a perfect answer, but one worth continuing to ask.