Find the ‘Why’ and the ‘How’ Becomes Irrelevant

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

-Sartre

We, as humans, spend an inordinate amount of time attempting to figure things out. We’ve developed the sciences to help us describe the natural world, we’ve developed religion to help us describe the metaphysical world, and along the way we developed complex systems of communication to help us transfer the things we’ve discovered to each other. With each new advancement in human understanding however, it seems as though we are not freed from the burdens of the unknown, but rather bogged down by a new series of questions. In our quest to figure things out, all we’re really doing is unearthing more that “needs” to be understood. Whether in the finite or the infinite, the discrete or the whole, we are by our very nature processors of information; it’s hardwired into our existence and it’s the reason we’ve arrived where we are evolutionarily.

What we’ve failed to grasp along our path down the search for understanding however, is how and why to not venture down those forks of dubious inquiry that the path invariably will offer. In that, maybe always trying to understand leaves us less whole than when we started. This has never been more apparent than in the information age. We are consumers of information and, effectively consumed by it. Never before have we had so many ‘answers’ at our fingertips, yet never before have we been burdened by so many questions. Maybe the answers don’t exist in the questions…maybe the answer is that there isn’t one. Or, at least not one that will lead us to fulfillment, contentment, and ultimately satisfaction.

Maybe, as opposed to attempting to figure things out, it’s time we try to figure out how to be. How to be still, how to be quiet, how to be present. Easier said than done, I know. And I’m by no means sitting here saying I’ve got it figured out. But I think what Sartre was trying to say here was that instead of feeling that permanent discontent with not having an answer, we should look to find contentment in the uncertainty of being and embrace the absurdity of that fact as creatures who, by all accounts, are designed to do nothing but the opposite. We need to be searching for our ‘why’, instead of always reaching for an understanding of the ‘how’ and in that, maybe our list of questions won’t necessarily become shorter, but we’ll realize that most of them don’t actually matter.