The unexamined life is not worth living — From the Desk of van Schneider — Edition №259

Last week I wrote about "Style is the answer to everything", a short personal meditation on style and a subtle nod to one of my favorite poems by Charles Bukowski. If you missed it, I highly recommend you read it.

You can now read it here on my blog — And as always, feel free to share it with your colleagues or friends.

For this week, I already had an essay planned but then changed my mind last minute and typed up the one below over the weekend. Sometimes a certain topic just overcomes me in the moment and this was one of those times.

I hope you enjoy the read!

The unexamined life is not worth living.

The timeless insight of Socrates still resonates with me every single day: to live without questioning is to live without purpose. I've come to embrace this truth so deeply that I can't imagine living any other way. Possibly even to my own detriment.

As with many other things, this relentless curiosity is most certainly the fault of my mother (thanks mom). Throughout my childhood she riddled every conversation with "why?" and "why not?" It was so incredibly annoying I have to say. As a teenager I resented this trait. Her constant questioning made us stand out in public when all I wanted was to blend in with the crowd. I just wanted to accept things at face value and move on without disrupting the comforts of the status quo.

For example: Unlike other parents who defaulted to supporting and believing school teachers, my mother was fiercely on my side at all times. Her complete support, which was mortifying considering my social aspirations at the time, challenged the usual parent-teacher dynamic in ways that made teachers avoid her entirely. She was everything but your "normal" mother. At the time I was of course too young to understand this wonderful asset I had on my side.

But with age came wisdom. Eventually I found myself intoxicated by the very questions I once avoided. The real power, I discovered, is not only in challenging others but in turning these questions inward, examining my own beliefs and assumptions.

Today I feel as if I'm mostly surrounded by people online with a mouthful of scripture but not a single cell in their body that longs to explain the unexplainable for themselves. Very few deep questions are being asked anymore. No spark of even the slightest curiosity outside of the mandatory popular opinion. All the knowledge at our fingertips, but few attempts to dive deep, even if just for the thrill of it.

And I fully understand why.

Even if you dive deep into a complex topic, it’s very unlikely that you will find the comforting clarity you were looking for. In fact, you might just end up finding more questions that need to be answered. It will be a lifelong quest.

I often feel incredibly alone in all this. Most people shy away from questioning their fundamental beliefs or popular opinion – it's frightening to place everything you hold true under the microscope of scrutiny. Even voicing a gentle and innocent "why" could feel like an act of social rebellion in todays time. But it's precisely this collective reluctance to question that keeps us in place, unable to escape what I can only call "the matrix" for the lack of a better term. The comfort of certainty, even if illusory, often proves more appealing than the disorienting and muddy waters of doubt. I get it, I really do.

Yet like Socrates, I cannot accept an unexamined existence. Living on autopilot, conforming merely for conformity's sake feels like a betrayal of our human capacity for understanding. It feels like a betrayal of myself. And even if I will never understand it all (and I'm certain I won't), I have at least tried, and in the process found some beautiful things.

So I embrace my role as the asker of "foolish" questions. The eternal seeker of WHY and WHY NOT. I want to wrangle with life's complexities even if it leads me nowhere, knowing that each answer will likely spawn more questions and yet another answer, each of them truer than the one before.

I want to be "a hopelessly inquisitive man" (some distinguished readers will notice The Master reference), even if that's the only thing I will ever be.

How could you not?

Thank you for reading and have a wonderful week!

Yours truly,
Tobias