What Questions Never Leave You?
[Each Tuesday I take the top voted question from readers and answer it (submit yours here). With 119 votes, this week’s winner was submitted by Max]
To answer the question about what questions never leave me I skimmed through my journal. Few people keep them anymore and I don’t understand why: it’s a secret weapon for sell discovery. A diary is a time travel device anyone can make. It lets you jump back in time and see what you truly thought in the past, which is very different than what you believe you thought. Human memory is terrible and reading a journal you discover hidden patterns in your thoughts and feelings you might never discover any other way. Writing in a diary today is a gift to the future version of ourselves.
I didn’t find many questions in my journal. There were certainly some, on average one per entry, but is that a lot? Since I have no basis for comparison I don’t know if the number I found was low, high or average. And of course most of my thoughts stay in my head, never making it into my journal which means at best my list below is a guess. I considered the questions I believe I ask myself often, but since I wrote it knowing it would be published it might be biased towards ones that sound impressive, rather than ones I truly ask myself often.
Death is a powerful motivator and is often on my mind. It’s no surprise many of my questions center on time and how I use it, as do the rules I live by. Since I ask these questions often I have answers to them that rarely change, which suggests I need to ask myself why they haven’t changed in a long time.
- Is there any point to existence, or the universe, at all?
- What is the best way to live given what I know, what I don’t know and what I can’t know?
- What are the meanings of my life that I have chosen?
- Is my time aligned with my goals?
- Am I giving time to the people I care about most?
- Am I giving time to the ideas and beliefs I care about most?
- Are my actions aligned with my beliefs?
- Am I taking my life seriously enough?
- Am I enjoying life and not taking life too seriously?
- How am I not myself?
- What am I hiding from?
- Am I pushing myself and loving myself?
- What assumptions am I making that I don’t realize?
- What blind spots do I have that are hurting me or others?
- What questions have I forgot to ask myself?
- Should my answers to these questions change?
What questions do you find yourself asking often over your life?
