Watch a small child for one hour and count the questions. Why is it like that. Why do we do it that way. Why does that person say that. What is it for, where does it go, who decided. Now count your own from the last month, and not the practical ones about arrangements and prices and times. The other kind. The ones with no use.
Most of us would find very few, and a good number would find none at all. The difference between that child and us is not intelligence and it is not available time, because the child has less of both. Something specific happened in between, and it is worth being honest about what it was, even though the honesty is not comfortable.
The questions were not answered. They were outlasted. A child asks something the adults around her cannot answer, and rather than say so, they tell her to be quiet, or that it is not for her to ask, or that she will understand when she is older. She asks again a week later and is told the same thing in a slightly firmer voice. Eventually, being a reasonable creature, she concludes that this activity has a cost and no return, and she stops.
It is not cruelty
This is easy to turn into blame and blame is not accurate. The adults were not being cruel and most of them loved the child a great deal. They genuinely did not know the answers. Nobody had answered them either, when they were small, and so they had inherited a set of practices without any of the reasoning underneath them.
A child asking why puts an adult in a position that feels like exposure, and exposure is unpleasant, particularly in front of somebody who thinks you know everything. So the child is silenced, not out of malice but out of the adult's own unadmitted not knowing. It is a small act, repeated a few dozen times, and it does not feel like anything to the person doing it.
And the child grows up. By the time she is grown the questions have faded, and one day her own child asks her why, and she says the same thing that was said to her, in almost the same words, without ever recognising the sentence. That is how it continues, not by anybody's decision but by the ordinary transmission of what was received. It goes on until somebody, somewhere in the chain, refuses, and refusing is expensive.
What fills the space
The questions do not simply leave a gap behind them. Something moves into the space, and what moves in is efficiency. Once anybody stops asking why, they can move much faster, because the arrangements are accepted and the sequence is followed and nothing is slowed down by the constant reopening of matters that are already settled. This is genuinely useful, and a life spent questioning every practice would be unlivable and probably unbearable to be near.
But there is a cost, and the cost is invisible for about thirty years, which is exactly long enough for it to become permanent. A person becomes extremely good at answering questions and completely out of practice at asking them. Their intelligence keeps developing all the while, so nothing appears to be wrong. Their ability to enquire quietly withers, and these are not the same thing at all, though almost everything in our education treats them as one.
By middle life somebody can solve almost any problem handed to them and cannot easily tell whether they wanted any of the things they have spent their life getting. Because that would have required a why, and those were put down at seven. Nobody notices, because everybody nearby put theirs down at roughly the same age.
The harder direction
There is one place where the asking is harder than anywhere else, and it is not the universe or the meaning of things. It is here, in one's own life, about oneself. Why do we do that. Why does that particular remark still bother us after twenty years. Why did we want this. Why can we not stop. Why are we so tired when nothing is wrong.
Questions about the world can be researched, and there is comfort in that, because somebody has usually written something. Questions about oneself have no source to consult, no expert to defer to, and nobody who has already worked it out on anybody's behalf. They have to be sat with, and they do not resolve quickly, and there are long stretches where there is only the question and no movement at all. It is entirely understandable that people avoid this, and the avoidance is usually called being busy.
What can be observed is that the questions come anyway. They wait. They wait for a quiet period, or an illness, or a loss, or simply for the day the running stops. Then they arrive all at once, and much larger than they would have been if they had been let in earlier. The ones asking them are not extraordinary people. Those who have not started have simply not reached the point where the questions arrive, and their time will come exactly as it came for everybody else.
