What is the Question Your Life is Trying to Answer?

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This is How to Live: A newsletter for those who want to live more easily in a world that often feels too hard.

Beloved readers,

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THIS WEEK’S REC:

In The Good Enough Job, journalist Simone Stolzoff traces how work has come to dominate Americans’ lives—and why we find it so difficult to let go. Based on groundbreaking reporting and interviews with Michelin star chefs, Wall Street bankers, overwhelmed teachers, and other workers across the American economy, Stolzoff exposes what we lose when we expect work to be more than a job.

Rather than treat work as a calling or a dream, he asks what it would take to reframe work as a part of life rather than the entirety of our lives. What does it mean for a job to be good enough?

WHAT IS THE QUESTION YOUR LIFE IS TRYING TO ANSWER?

At a gallery opening years ago, a news anchor asked the artist Julian Schnabel about the meaning of his painting.

He turned and pointed to the painting and said something like: “The orange line means there’s an orange line. The yellow line means there’s a yellow line, and the blue background means there’s a blue background.”

I understand his response to this question about what art means.

Because to ask an artist to explain the meaning of their artwork is to fundamentally misunderstand the artist.

Sure, some artists can and want to explain the meaning of their work, but for others, defining its meaning is not the “reason” one makes art.

After all, meaning comes not simply from one piece but from a body of work. If you look at the full spectrum of an artist’s output, you’ll see a through line, a struggle that persists and threads through everything.

Often—too often—artists and writers are asked: What is your book ABOUT? What is your painting SAYING? What does your dance MEAN?

This question fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the creative act, imagination, and wonder. Demanding someone tell you what to think of a piece of art is like going to therapy and ordering the therapist to make sense of your life in one session.

It doesn’t matter what the artist meant. Often, the artist doesn’t know, which is why they spent four years making it. Life is a question that art tries to answer, which is why demanding answers from a single work of art is a short-term game played in a (hopefully) long-term life.

When you look at an entire or growing body of work, you can begin to identify the questions and themes that perpetuate throughout on your own. You may discover that what drives you is the question, not the answers.

A better and more fruitful way to ask what something means is to flip the question around and put it back on yourself. It’s my belief that at the core of every person lies a question, and life takes its shape from the conscious or subconscious pursuit of answering or avoiding that question.

If you look at your life with the objectivity of viewing an artist’s body of work, what themes do you see? What recurs? What is your constant struggle? What are your patterns? What do you run from? What do you fear?

What is the question your life is trying to answer?

Back in the 1990s, I was friends with this kid named Arlo (not his real name). He was cooler than anyone I’d ever met. It was an innate coolness—effortless and unpretentious. People flocked to him.

He liked to get a drink after work at Bar 81, a no-frills East Village watering hole near Blue and Gold (my favorite); it had a pool table and grungy banquets ( the cover photo of my first novel, The Long Haul, was shot there). Bar 81 was THE bar to go to because Arlo went there.

My friend knew he was cool. Arlo knew other people thought he was cool, but he didn’t think about it or care, which only made him cooler. Other people wondered what made him cool, but couldn’t define it, which kept the answer mysterious and the drive to be around him constant. But then …

… Arlo went to Africa for six months with a friend. They had a spiritual awakening, and Arlo was different when they returned. He was … less cool. He had lost something, but it was hard to say what.

One night we went to a different bar and had a heart-to-heart. And it was there he told me what happened.

“I put my finger on it,” he said.

“You put your finger on what?” I asked.

“On what makes me cool. I named it, and in the naming of it, I lost it.”

I sat there for a moment, realizing that he had disclosed a life truth to me, one I’d never considered. Sometimes naming something can save a life (like getting a diagnosis), but other times, it can undo a person.

It’s the same thing when you make a piece of art. When you identify what it is that you’re doing, when you name the “point” of it during the process of making it, you can lose the drive to continue.

This is what happened to Arlo. He lost his cool in Africa by naming the ineffable essence that caused people to flock to him. Landing on the why of himself answered a question that wasn’t asking to be answered. In solving his mystery, he’d lost his mystique.

Arlo put his finger on the answer instead of actively living the question without needing anything from it. His coolness, like all life, was a response to something, perhaps a maladaptive way to correct some perceived flaw. In art and coolness, identifying and naming can deflate the joyful pursuit of living inside a self or a piece of work.

The question of your life is in your responses, not the answers. The distinction is that answers are direct and closed; responses are open-ended and fluid.

Trying to identify the question your life is trying to answer offers you an opportunity to focus on what matters to you; to discover why you are drawn and driven by some things and not others.

But the best part about trying to name the question your life is trying to answer is that you are not in pursuit of naming the answer. Only the question.

How do you spend your days? What gives your life meaning? Which books are you drawn to? Who do you spend time with? What movies do you like? What work do you do? What part of work do you love most? What part of work do you dislike? What conversations fill you up, and what conversations drain you?

Are you drawn to articles about psychology and philosophy, or do you like celebrity gossip? What games do you play, what sports do you like, what foods do you eat? Are you searching for friends or a community? What kind?

Do your surroundings fulfill you? Who do you date, and what do they have in common? What kind of partner are you, do you communicate well, are you self-reflective, and if so, what do you spend the most time reflecting upon?

When you meet new people, what are you most interested in learning about them? What questions do you tend to ask first, and are you withholding the questions you’d rather ask?

Here’s where I stand: I am interested in the roots of things. I want to know everyone’s origin story. Why are you the way you are? What happened to you, and how did it shape your life? I believe everyone has an original self that either gets corrupted through early childhood trauma or doesn’t get corrupted all that much.

I am interested in the ways that being human is misunderstood by humans and the flawed systems that humans build that make life more challenging instead of easier. I am interested in our incongruence, how we say one thing and do another. How our words and actions are often misaligned.

These are questions of pursuit. These are the things that drive me. Of course, I’m pursuing the answer, but the drive is in the questioning.

I am not as interested in answering who I am as much as I am articulating the question my life is trying to answer. Because the answer will never fully come because a question demands more questions, and there is never just one answer—which is why one artist’s body of work is often the result of trying to answer the same question from different angles.

As a society, we focus on arriving somewhere, being right, and always having the answer. We focus on the outcome and overlook the process. But life is one long process, so perhaps we should stop trying to answer the question of our lives and focus on the question itself.

So, what is the question your life is trying to answer?

If you have thoughts on this piece or want to share the question your life is trying to answer, share in the comments!

Until next week, I remain…

Amanda

About me: I am an author and a mental health advocate. I’ve published 13 books, most recently Little Panic: Dispatches From An Anxious Life. I sit on the advisory board of Bring Change to Mind and live in Brooklyn with my dog, Busy.