the answer is 42
“The Answer to the Great Question…”
“Of Life, the Universe and Everything…”
“Is…”
“Is…”
“Forty-two,” said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.
“I checked it very thoroughly,” said the computer, “and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.”
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Humanity now has access to machines that can provide decent answers to any question, 24 hours a day, almost for free. But are these answers truly useful to you? If you seek answers without properly understanding what you're curious about, what meaning do they hold? It's the questions that make answers valuable, and with wrong questions, you cannot get right answers.
The right questions inevitably require understanding of one's own philosophical inquietudes and profound aspirations. There's a certain wildness that reveals itself only to those who question. This wildness seems to stem from our philosophical inquietudes and profound aspirations. Without first understanding the source of this wildness, if we only question what appears on the surface of our consciousness, we cannot ask the right questions to get the right answers. Questions reflect our reason for being and our goals. Do you have a clear explanation of your reason for being and your desires? Are you curious about them? Some questions require other questions to be asked first.
Right questions also require questioning the assumptions that underlie them. If the assumptions themselves are wrong, no matter how precise and sophisticated the logic built upon them, you cannot get the right answers. Most of the rules and principles that seem to make up our world weren't there from the beginning. If you abstract these together as "the way things are" and base your questions on them, you cannot get the right answers. Where you exist now, everything you eat and drink, and all the rules you follow habitually didn't exist just decades ago.
People who give good answers to the world seem to have good questions first.
Do you have good enough questions?