Don't kill the question

I have a habit of quickly searching online whenever I don’t know something. Not even a second passes before I type my question into the search box or prompt an LLM. I get my answer and move on, but then immediately forget about it and the question leading up to it.

When you don’t know, your question comes to life: you flirt with it on your way home, marinate it in your brain during dinner, and you can’t stop thinking about it when you’re trying to fall asleep – and most of the time, you eventually arrive at an answer. When you rush to it, you miss out on this journey. Looking directly at the answer reduces the question to a mere fact; it's like looking up the result of a maths exercise without doing the calculations yourself. The wonder(ing) is gone, the question is dead.

Why are we so eager to kill it in the first place? Some questions should be answered immediately; sometimes you just need information. But often the underlying reason is that it’s really uncomfortable not to know. Sitting with a living question feels kinda bad, and our information environment has made that tension absurdly easy to eliminate. While we could use external information to nourish and deepen our questions, we often use it to kill them.

Problem is, the more you develop the habit of getting “free” and easy answers by outsourcing your thinking like this, the less discomfort you’re willing to put up with for other questions. When you get into the habit of looking up everything, then even important questions like “What should I do with my life?” feel like they ought to have a quick googleable answer. So you search and learn about a ton of different ideas and frameworks, but in the end you’re just distracting yourself from thinking and making decisions.

Instead, I think we should pause more often. To not give in to the discomfort and realize that it’s just part of curiosity. There’s nothing wrong with looking things up, but by doing so immediately we miss out on a period of wonder in which we make the answer our own. So don't kill the question, let it live for a while.