Five Enormous Questions That Scare The Crap Out Of Me

Surgeons must resign themselves to blood and guts, plumbers must accept that something’s going to overflow or back up, and accountants need to become okay with a regular deluge of numbers. When you sign up to be a philosopher, you accept that sometimes you are going to have ick of a different sort. In amongst the very cool and interesting ideas we get to investigate and discuss, there is some dark and difficult stuff. We have to accept that sometimes we aren’t going to like the answers we find. Sometimes the questions alone are likely to freak us out.

You get used to philosophical ick, the same way a surgeon gets used to entrails, a plumber gets used to sewage, and an accountant gets used to equations. I’ve been at this stuff for over three decades, and I’ve developed sufficient metaphorical calluses that there isn’t much I can’t think about or talk about. Just ask my very annoyed friends and family. I still don’t have answers to many (or any) of the questions I tackle, but it doesn’t hurt me to ask them.

Most of them.

I confess that there are still a handful of big questions that make me cringe. It’s not that the others (and there are a million others) aren’t important, but these are the big ones for me. For the sake of philosophical transparency, I thought I’d fess up. Here are the ones that still, after all these years, scare me a little:

1.    What if there are no good guys? What if I’m not a good guy either? If being a good guy is as unimportant as it appears to be right now, then what the blazes am I doing trying to stay on the right side of things?

2.    What if happiness is neither sufficient nor necessary to live a good life? Philosophers have been chirping away about it for thousands of years, but what if chasing it incessantly is just exhausting? Is the juice worth the squeeze?  

3.    What if the rest of creation hates our (humans’) ever-loving guts? What if we’re not anywhere near as important, smart, cool, or interesting as we believe ourselves to be? What if we went poof and disappeared and no one anywhere gave a crap, or even noticed we were gone? What if the rest of the universe was, in fact, relieved to see us go?  

4.    What if what they told us during childhood tantrums is true, and life really isn’t fair? What if, as my existential predecessors insisted, it is my job to constantly seek out and test fairness, without a prescribed set of rules for it? What if that’s going to be my job for the rest of my life, and I’m never going to get to take a day off?

5.    What do I do in situations where no one’s even remotely interested in rational discourse (this one is particularly disturbing)? If I am, as Aristotle insisted, an animal that thinks, then how do I relate to or function alongside other animals that don’t want to think, are afraid to think, aren’t allowed to think, or who don’t want others to think?

These five questions evoke in me the same sensation, the same uneasiness as an exceptional movie or TV cliffhanger, one that’s been so carefully crafted that you just can’t imagine how the protagonist is going to get out of the pickle they’re in. These are the questions that mean staring into the abyss, not being entirely sure if you want it to stare back or not.

But I still ask them. I still think about them. For me, these are the hardest of the hard ones. It’s because they are so unspeakably hard that I keep them top of mind. The hard questions are the most important. As one of my undergrad profs advised, if it makes you uncomfortable, then you should be sitting and asking why it makes you uncomfortable, not stuffing it away. These are the questions that are going to colour how I step into the world every day, how I conduct myself, how I grow or shrink as a human being. These questions are not only what I signed up for when I cracked the spine on my first-year philosophy text, but what I think I’m supposed to be doing with my time for as long as I have time left.

And no, surprisingly, these questions don’t make me depressed or defeated. They aren’t a hard shove toward nihilism. Quite the opposite. Continuing to dig through them, even when they seem heavy, miserable, and vast, makes me feel brave, makes me feel like I have important work to do. They’re the boulder, but also the carrot at the end of the stick. They’re the reminder that I’m not done, that I’ll never run out of things to do.

So, which questions are on your list?