questions are desire paths of curiosity

meta-notes on what questions mean + how to ask good questions

I’m one of those people who gets particularly—nerdily—excited about chasing tendrils of curiosity down rabbit holes. I have an uncanny ability for sourcing information that other people might not find in places they don’t seek, and I unleash it on any topic that catches my fancy (lately, it’s been technology, craft, furniture, literature, and internet linguistics). It checks out that my favourite way that someone’s ever described me is this: “There are esoteric corners of the internet that only she knows how to find”. 

But if there’s one thing I love more than going down rabbit holes, it’s finding them through questions. To me, the ability to articulate a curiosity, to shape a nascent feeling using words, sometimes feels like more of an achievement than finding the answer itself.

The textbook definition of a question is a sentence used to seek information. But it feels borderline criminal to reduce something as foundational as a question to something…transactional. We think in questions. If knowledge is a complex web inside the mind, each node is a question, and each connecting line the information you’ve picked up on the journey from node to node. The pursuit of knowledge is the accumulation of questions. They shape our identity as much by being asked as by being answered.

I think of my niece who, at 10 years old, made it her full-time job to ricochet questions off every adult she ever met:

“Why is the sky blue?”

“How is the sun so bright?”

“Why do birds fly?”

If you really think about it, her questions don’t just yield answers; they’re helping her build an understanding of the world. Not much will change as she grows older. Her contexts and environments will expand, but she’ll still rely on questions to navigate the world (they’ll just not seem quite as simple). Knowledge responds to the gravitational pull of questions: new questions, and new questions about old questions.

Unfortunately, we’re taught to focus on coming up with answers—the end results of thought—rather than the processes of thought themselves. I think it’s a stunted remnant of an industrial-age approach to education and work; it’s much easier to quantify hundreds of right answers than hundreds of thought processes. Questions become a sign of ineptitude. It’s why, in almost any context we find ourselves in as adults, the yardstick of intelligence will likely be what we know and not how we arrived there. To become active questioners, we have to uproot that way of thinking and remind ourselves that learning isn’t always being told what happened; learning is a happening in itself. A question is a way in which wonder expresses itself.

Questions are also indications of directions of curiosity. They remind me of desire paths: pathways in the grass that emerge organically from people's natural patterns of movement instead of prescribed routes. They’re such a wonderfully human example of how we like to follow impulse and intuition to find the most direct (or appealing way) to get somewhere. 

Recently, for example, I began writing down curiosities that played out in my mind, more to have a place to collect them than anything else. It was a blissfully haphazard mix: A question about bringing tech back in touch with humanity sat next to another that wonders how language has historically shaped reality. But as I kept returning to them and tacked on more questions in light of new knowledge, I realised those questions became signposts to my deepest curiosities. They arose not from established lines of inquiry but, to borrow from

Celine Nguyen

’s resonant essay, from “idiosyncratic passion and interest”. I think these questions, the ones that illuminate the mind’s desire paths, are the kind of questions worth chasing.

There’s an under-appreciated beauty in formulating a “good” question. What we ask, and how we ask it, determines what we'll discover. People often think about asking questions in ways that make sure the other person will have no choice but to answer it. But it’s nice to think about the practice of formulating questions as an art form in itself. Coming up with questions is also an act of creation. Understanding and honing the way you inquire about the world can be as active as getting answers to those inquiries.

There’s plenty of advice out there on asking good questions. Be a good listener. Know when to keep questions open-ended. Use the right tone, and read the room. They’re all correct. But the way I see it, all of these well-meaning notes are pointed at delivering questions in the context of a conversation with someone else. I think there’s power in figuring out how to intentionally craft questions before we even get to the asking. Questioning our questions, if you will. 

A good question begins by accepting that there are degrees to understanding. We’ll never know the full extent of anything; it’s humbling and it’s exciting. A question emerges in response to a gap, and a gap is usually noticed when you have existing knowledge to organise in a way that reveals it. You also need to be willing to return to basics once in a while — to open up a blank document, type down everything you think you know about a subject, and identify the gaps that take shape.

Deep work on seemingly simple things can always lead to new desire paths of curiosity. Writing, for example, is something I’ve been doing for more years than I have fingers and toes. It’s not something I consciously think about, just like a tap doesn’t think about letting water flow. But then, as people began asking me about the specifics of how to write, I had to take a step back and examine my own process. A torrent of questions emerged that I'd never seriously considered before. Do visual descriptions objectively tell a story better than simply relaying a fact? Why does the ambience of a coffee shop lend itself so well to the process of writing? If I wrote this sentence in other languages, would they follow the same syntax?

The more I dug into the underpinnings of writing, the more gaps I discovered in the knowledge that I previously assumed was complete. Like I said: humbling and exciting. 

A good question is aware of its assumptions. There’s an episode of BBC’s 1983 Fun to Imagine series with Dr Richard Feynman that I keep coming back to. In it, the interviewer asks Dr Feynman: "Why do magnets attract or repel each other?" It seems like an innocuous question on paper. But Dr Feynman’s answer turned out to be an incredible lesson, not in magnets, but in questioning our questions and creating better ones. The essence of his answer is that before we ask why, we must ask:

• What foundational facts is my question built upon?

• What implicit assumptions am I taking for granted?

• What conceptual framework am I asking this question in? 

Every question carries hidden assumptions and context. To ask a question—one that genuinely advances understanding—you must be aware of these assumptions.

When you ask “why can’t humans fly like birds?”, there are three assumptions: humans are grounded creatures and can’t fly unaided, birds have a capability humans lack, and this is a biological question. But once these hidden contexts are out in the open, you can have some fun. Are there examples in nature of humans who can glide short distances? Does assisted flight count? What happens when we look at this as an engineering problem instead of a biological one? If someone hadn’t asked these questions, we probably wouldn’t have aeroplanes today.

If you were trying to go deeper, you would choose to stick with the assumptions you’ve brought into your consciousness, and dig further. This doesn't mean never questioning foundations; it means being strategic about what you’re asking. I think this is great for when you start to feel overwhelmed by possibilities: you question one level at a time, within a chosen framework, while acknowledging that other frameworks exist. 

But novel questions also emerge from unique intersections. Asking a physicist “why is the sky blue?” will earn you a different answer than asking a Greek mythologist. Asking one question in different contexts reveals unexpected connections and syntheses you'd never perceive from just one vantage point. Once again, the way you choose to frame your question indicates your direction of curiosity.

A good question won’t always get you answers. And you shouldn’t always want them, anyway. I realise this feels a bit counterintuitive. Questions are tensions, and tensions seek resolution, right? But the problem with answer-led questioning is the tendency to stop at the first answer you get. It’s a result, sure, but it’s not always the truth. I’ll go back to my description of knowledge as nodes of questions — in this case, questions lead to other questions, and that helps you piece together a more complete picture of what you’re researching than if you were to stop at the first question. Some questions are meant to be navigational.

A good question acts as a radar. There’s a passage from one of Ottessa Moshfegh’s essays that really stuck with me ever since I read it:

When I am absorbed in writing a novel, reality starts twisting to reflect and inform everything I’ve been thinking about in my work.

I feel very strongly that this applies to questions, too — when you actively hold a question in your mind, you start to see potential answers and questions related to it pop up on your radar. You might even interpret other information in the context of this question, and relevant information comes together more organically and inspirationally. The key here, once again, is to make sure you aren’t optimising for answers right from the get-go. You have coffee rituals not for the coffee, but for the ritual.

In essence, a great question has a generative power that transcends any single answer. It perpetuates an upward virtuous cycle of ever-deeper curiosity, ever-richer perspective. To me, someone who asks great questions is both intelligent and wields the capacity for infinite abundance of knowledge. Ultimately, getting good at questions means getting good at thinking, the very essence of human experience.