The Power of Why

Inquisitiveness.*

Life has become so easy that we often take it all for granted.

In fact, many of you may have fallen out of the habit of asking why.

And what do I mean by that?

The art of critical thinking seems all but dead. With the rise of AI, many of the lessons that should have been taught have quietly vanished from the curriculum.

That simple question—why—was one of the most important parts of my growing up. The urge to examine everything in detail, to figure out how things worked, was what put the know in knowledge, the how in show—and, yes, the answer in why. (Okay, so there’s no literal why in answer, but you get what I mean.)

Fogy remembers when, as a boy, he would ask his father something. Instead of giving the full answer, his father would mention a part Fogy had already uncovered, then nudge him to go further, to dig deeper.

The idea of explaining everything, start to finish, never even crossed their minds.

Compare that to today—where every little detail must be spelled out, often with painstaking precision. And yet, ask a modern GEN to think critically, to rationalize a problem, and you're more likely to hear a chorus of why, why, why than see them actually work it out for themselves.

But maybe there’s a reason behind that resistance.

Maybe the fear is this: if too many people start asking why, too many uncomfortable truths will come to light.

After all, if we've learned how to feed knowledge into people, it's counterproductive when they start chewing it over for themselves—especially when they begin venturing down the dreaded why path, annoying everyone around them with inconvenient questions.

It doesn’t help that we’ve outsourced so much. When others can do what we don’t want to understand, the incentive to learn it ourselves fades.

We convince ourselves that what we do doesn’t need to be clouded by learning what we’ll never use—so why bother?

But little do most of you realise: a modest dose of curiosity today makes both today and tomorrow a lot easier—and infinitely more satisfying.

So let’s get back in the habit of asking yourself why.

Let’s learn some useless things today—because they might just turn out to be the most useful things of all.

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