Itches, biases & the space between answers

It’s been many months - years - that I have been feeling a creeping sense of annoyance, like a thick, scratchy synthetic tag on my back. It’s the kind of annoyance that I thought I could ignore at first, but as I would go on with my day, as I would sip on my second coffee and get pulled back into scrolling through feeds, the itch kept coming back – abrasive, obtrusive, icky.

On top of car honks, street vendor shouts, and the symphony of daily life, I’ve been noticing another noise, one quieter but somehow more insistent: a sense of unease with how loudly we celebrate answers. Polished certainty paraded as wisdom, quick solutions dressed in the language of expertise — all wrapped up in a veneer of ease.

And yet, the louder these answers grow, the more hollow they seem. Beneath the polish and precision, there’s a strange emptiness, a sense that something essential has been lost in the rush to simplify. Perhaps it’s the weight of the unspoken — of the nuance and complexity swept aside to make room for something more digestible.

At first, I welcomed this clarity. I wanted the answers, the neat conclusions, the pathways that promised to make the tangled threads of uncertainty manageable. But over time, I began to feel the tug of a different kind of question: What do we lose when we stop asking?

Questions have always felt heavier than answers. They linger. They don’t fit neatly into tidy frameworks or offer the immediate gratification of being solved. But they also do something remarkable: they expand. Where answers tend to close doors, questions nudge them ajar, letting in the possibility of something unexpected.

I think often about Rainer Maria Rilke’s plea to “live the questions now.” There’s a quiet courage in those words, an invitation to lean into uncertainty without the promise of resolution. It’s not a comfortable posture, but it feels truer to how life unfolds — not in straight lines or bullet points, but in spirals of discovery and reconsideration.

I have been wondering if our obsession with answers is, in part, a reaction to the discomfort of ambiguity. Answers make us feel in control, grounded. They give us something to cling to.

Ambiguity feels deeply unsettling to me. And yet, the more I have tried to lean into it, the more I catch my own brain in its dizzying complexity, a tangle of instincts and biases that seem almost designed to shield me from it. I see the pull of simplicity, the quiet whisper urging me toward the neatest, most intuitive path. I feel the nudge of confirmation, tempting me to seek only what aligns with what I already know. I notice how the uncertain edges of a choice make me hesitate, how I cling to familiar patterns even when they no longer serve me. It’s as though my mind conspires in subtle, unseen ways to soften the jagged edges of uncertainty, to find shelter in the comfort of control, even if that control is merely an illusion.

And so, I remind myself that we as humans are shaped by these tendencies — not out of failure but out of design. Our brains, remarkable as they are, crave simplicity, certainty, and the familiar, often at the expense of the nuance and curiosity that questions require. Perhaps that is why leaning into questions feels so alive — because it asks us to push against the grain of instinct. It’s a quiet rebellion, an act of trust in something larger. What might we discover if we allow ourselves to sit with the questions a little longer, to trace their edges and see where they lead?

Sitting with questions asks something of us; it feels counterintuitive, uncomfortable, even unnerving. It asks us to resist the pull of quick conclusions, to surrender the need to have it all figured out. It asks for patience, for humility, for the willingness to admit that we might not know — not yet, perhaps not ever.

But in that not knowing, something shifts. The ground beneath us softens, and with it, our posture. Instead of rigid certainty, we can stand with curiosity, with openness, with imagination. As I write this, I notice that scratchy, synthetic tag — the one that tugs at me — beginning to soften. It no longer feels like something to silence but something to heed, a quiet nudge toward the spaces I might have been avoiding, a reminder that the itch itself holds the promise of possibility.

And maybe that’s the real value of questions: not in the answers they eventually lead to, but in the space they create. A space for reflection, for connection, for imagining futures we might not have considered otherwise.

One of the questions I’ve been living with lately is this: “How might the space we create by asking better questions shape the futures we hope to build?”

I don’t have an answer. And for now, that feels like enough.