The questions that define you

When it comes to understanding one’s self, we are quite literally paralyzed with the varieties of philosophical frameworks available to us. Aristotle popularized the idea of personalities lying on a spectrum of two extremes; Psychology popularized the Big Five OCEAN; Plato grouped people based on mind and appetite.

Personally, I am partial to the idea of using questions. It’s accepted that knowledge is built when you choose the right questions to ask. It stands to reason then that you can build knowledge about yourself when you ask the right questions about yourself.

Now other people have approached this by suggesting a list of questions that you can contemplate on and come to an answer. In essence, Knowledge of yourself comes from the responses you give to this set of golden questions.

However, I would like to offer another angle to approach this. Instead of focusing on the answers, we should focus on the question. You can know yourself way better if you can craft your own sets of questions that matter to you.

To give an analogy: Knowing yourself is like artistry; you are trying to express who you are into a tangible form. The thing is, if you’re an artist, the focus is rarely on the finished work. In fact, over the course of your self-artistic journey, you’d craft all sorts of personas, pictures, and expressions of yourself. The works being different doesn’t mean you are a different person; they’ll most likely still be congruent and coherent as a set.

The fact is, if you’re going to be a good artist, you need to focus on your tools and your techniques. In the world of self-reflection and self-knowledge, that means you would spend time honing and refining your self-questions.

Self-Questions are the questions that you hold as important to you. These questions would ideally help you to figure out what’s real, what’s ethical, what’s meaningful, and what’s worth fighting for. The answers to these questions matter far less than the intent, content, and consequent of the questions themselves.

Everyone’s self-questions would be different, but I do think that some self-questions are better than others. The best ones, I feel, would be those that are creative, challenging, and forces yourself to make choices. It’s not an exact science, but good questions should encourage research, motivate change, and sharpen one’s perspectives.

I’ll likely explore this idea in the future. Until then, here are some Self-Questions that I have:

1. At what point does something become not clean anymore?
2. Is your ghost really you?
3. Is liberty zero-sum?
4. What makes things valuable?
5. What helps people who are knocked down to get back up?
6. Will people stay Good?