What About All the Questions We Haven’t Answered?

Hey there, I’m Stephen Dubner. If you were listening last week, you know this is the final new episode of No Stupid Questions. Everyone here at the Freakonomics Radio Network is proud of the five years’ worth of episodes we’ve made, and we are especially grateful for you, our amazing community of listeners. And we don’t want to leave you with nothing to listen to! So starting next week, we’re going to replay this series from the beginning, more than 200 episodes. So come back then to hear the very first episode of No Stupid Questions. And now, for their final new episode, here are Angela and Mike.

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MAUGHAN: I’m excited to learn from you what the purpose of life is. 

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DUCKWORTH: I’m Angela Duckworth.

MAUGHAN: I’m Mike Maughan.

DUCKWORTH + MAUGHAN: And you’re listening to No Stupid Questions.

Today on the show: What do we do with unanswered questions?

DUCKWORTH: What is life all about? What is the nature of human existence? 

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DUCKWORTH: Mike, this is our final episode, and to be honest, it’s a bittersweet moment.

MAUGHAN: It is a, a bittersweet moment. I mean, look, together we’ve discussed so many amazing questions about human nature, and the end of the show means that there are a lot of questions that are going to go unanswered. 

DUCKWORTH: Wait, we didn’t answer all questions about human nature?

MAUGHAN: Shockingly, no.

DUCKWORTH: You know, in life maybe there always will be more questions. I mean, Mike, what do we do with all the unanswered questions?

MAUGHAN: Well, there, Angela Duckworth, is the question of questions.

DUCKWORTH: Let’s talk about that as our last conversation. How about that?

MAUGHAN: I love that idea, because there are so many unanswered questions. I mean, the way I kind of look at it — and I’m going to say this with the confidence of a non-scientist who’s only speaking from life experience — but I kind of think about questions in three categories. There’s sort of the, the educational — like, knowledge exists and we need to find it. There’s the experiential which is: should I take this job, get into this relationship, move to this new place, whatever? And then there’s the existential, which is like: what’s the purpose of life?

DUCKWORTH: I mean, we’ve talked on No Stupid Questions at length at various times about how not knowing, how uncertainty, how unresolved doubt, how ambiguity is aversive. The state of not knowing — the lack of closure — some would argue that the whole world is in a state of anxiety and uncertainty — like, we are in a moment in history, politically, where it’s not certain how things are going to go. People feel that way about the economy, about generative A.I.

MAUGHAN: I think that that’s absolutely true. I think a big piece of our ability to have a happy, healthy, meaningful life is our ability to learn to deal with uncertainty. There are several clinical psychologists that I’ve been reading about who’ve started working with patients trying to bolster their tolerance for uncertainty, because much of what feeds into anxiety is this fact that people need to grow the muscle of developing greater tolerance for uncertainty.

DUCKWORTH: So, not resolving the uncertainty, but, like, holding it.

MAUGHAN: Right, there’s so much uncertainty that can’t be resolved immediately. I don’t know what’s going to happen with A.I., right? Like, I can’t fix that, so it has to be how to deal with it, rather than to get the answer to what will happen.

DUCKWORTH: Is that the goal though? I wonder about this. Like, is the goal to be able to tolerate uncertainty? Like, is that as good as it gets? Or is the idea that you can actually enjoy a state of unknowing? I mean, Is the high water mark that you get to a kind of ability to hold it and not fall apart? Or is it actually supposed to be a wonderful thing to have unresolved questions in your life?

MAUGHAN: I will just say that with my experience in sports, I’ve talked to a bunch of professional athletes who are going into these really, really big moments in their lives — whether it’s game seven of a World Series or N.B.A. Finals — and they have to get to a point in their mind where they reframe the anxiety, the fear, the pressure into excitement. And if they can reframe that in their own minds, that this moment is all excitement versus fear, anxiety, uncertainty, doubt — now, how do you do that? I can’t pretend I have any idea how to do that, but that’s how they’ve talked about how they got through that moment.

DUCKWORTH: Okay. So, you’re — you’re coming down on the side of, “it can be a good thing.” I taught a paper to my undergraduates in this current semester where I’m teaching about grit and about finding, you know, passion and perseverance for long-term goals in your own life. And when I teach this class, I like to teach this article that was published some years ago, 2019, by a group of researchers who asked the question: When you are confused — and I think that’s one way to describe this lack of resolution, this like, “I have a question, but I don’t know what the answer is.” When you have this feeling of confusion, does it lead you to be more interested — as in you’re leaning in, I’m excited about this — or the opposite, right? They run a bunch of studies in a lot of different contexts, you know, problem solving and how people respond to art or a poem, and what they find is that it depends.

MAUGHAN: I am shocked that that’s the answer. “It depends.”

DUCKWORTH: Depends. Yeah, that’s a good two-word summary of — yeah, if you want to know the answer to, like, all of the unanswered questions: “it depends.” That would be one way to succinctly tie up any doubt anyone has. It does always depend. But in this case, it depends on something that we’ve talked about before, Mike, which is the Big Five personality trait of openness to experience. And what they found is that when you are high in this personality trait of openness to experience — you know, the kind of person who wants to go to museums, and read books, and frankly is interested in conversations and questions — those people, actually, are able to feel confused and to feel interested at the same time. They have, like, an approach-orientation. They’re like, “Oh, I don’t understand that.” And they lean in. And then, if you’re very low in openness to experience, you don’t get that. I mean, confusion, some would argue is like the hallmark of the learning state. Like, people don’t learn when they’re not confused, and you don’t learn when you’re not uncertain either. I think that the thing you need to make uncertainty feel exciting is the confidence that you will eventually know. I think uncertainty that you do not expect to ever get resolved does not lead to interest and the flow state and approach motivation. There has to be some confidence that you will know. So, it can be, in a way, the best life. But, it’s not like that for everyone. And maybe you’re right. Maybe we can just be like an N.B.A. player and be like, “It’s excitement!” Or, like, channel your inner, you know, high-Big-Five-open-to-experience persona. But I think there’s a reason from an evolutionary perspective that we are seeking to escape uncertainty, right? Like, even when you say it’s a wonderful life to be, like, constantly asking questions, I don’t think you’re depicting a life where people just sit with uncertainty and don’t try to resolve it. So, there’s always a movement towards understanding, which I think is a survival instinct, right? Like, you can’t not know whether this is or isn’t a good patch to forage in or, like, that is or isn’t a predator. Lack of knowing is a dangerous thing. 

MAUGHAN: It is a dangerous thing. I think lack of asking questions is more dangerous. And again, I know we’re talking about almost different questions here. There are so many types of unanswered questions. One is just being curious about the world around you. Learning. I think that A.I. can seem really scary, and we can start getting experience with it. And once we begin using it and seeing how it works and gaining some familiarity, some things become less scary. We’ve said before the old line, “It’s hard to hate up close,” right? We can be really afraid of people, or situations, or, quote, “otherness,” but “hard to hate up close” if we ask the questions who these people are. You know, there — I think it’s, I don’t know, some old Irish prayer, you know, “help me change the things I can change and not” —

DUCKWORTH: Oh! No, no, no, no. You’re thinking of the Serenity Prayer.

MAUGHAN: The serenity — yeah. Say it. Will you say it? I can’t remember it off the top of my head.

DUCKWORTH: So, the Serenity Prayer — I’m going to come off like I’m some theologian, but I really just did a reasonably deep dive into the Serenity Prayer in particular, so please do not overestimate my general knowledge of Christian theology. But the Serenity Prayer, which has been phrased and rephrased. The Alcoholics Anonymous chapters have a pithy version that goes something like, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” That’s a sort of shorthand version of a slightly longer serenity prayer that was attributed to — there’s a little bit of, actually, uncertainty as to the provenance of the first Serenity Prayer, but Reinhold Niebuhr was a Protestant minister in New England. And the time that he was, you know, writing and preaching, and said to have given the very first Serenity Prayer in a sermon somewhere, was World War II. And interestingly, this historical context matters because it’s usually considered a prayer about accepting the things that you cannot change, right? Some version of this would be like, “Grant me the serenity to accept the uncertainty of, you know, all the questions that I cannot answer.” But actually, if you listen to Reinhold Niebuhr’s daughter, who was named Elisabeth Sifton. She did not grow up to be a minister herself, but she did grow up to be a very famous editor, and she was also a writer. And she wrote a whole book on her father’s Serenity Prayer and the evolution of this prayer. It’s probably, I would argue, the most famous prayer in the world, almost. You know, there are more than 2 million members of Alcoholics Anonymous. Like, it’s uttered, you know, weekly. She said that, really, the emphasis is on the second line: “the courage to change the things I can.” And that’s actually a shorthand version of what Niebuhr originally wrote, which is, “the courage to change the things that should be changed.” And again World War II as a context is important, because he essentially was saying that we have to be more active. Like, if you just, like, sit around and allow the world to just unfold the way it’s unfolding then you’re not going to get the world you want. So, in a way, the idea that it’s called the Serenity Prayer — you know, you could also call it the Courage Prayer. And that would say, for all the unanswered questions and all the unfinished tasks that, yeah, I mean, you want serenity to accept the things that you can’t change, but wow, you sure want a lot of courage to address the questions and finish the tasks that can be addressed and finished. There are people like, “Oh, Reinhold Niebuhr didn’t even write the thing.” And, you know, they have different interpretations, but I think it’s a very important point to make, that, like, even though we’re trying to resolve questions, the goal is not to have no questions, right?

MAUGHAN: No, the goal is to have a lot questions. And I would say that so much of life is about: what are the questions that we’re asking? Are we asking questions about things that we can learn or where we can make a difference? We have the courage to do it. Or are we just wallowing in a mess of questions that cause us to worry about the future all the time while we’re not taking any action or doing anything that’s important. And so, to me, it boils down to: what do we do with unanswered questions? Well, we can go work on them. We can help try to solve them. We can go learn about them. But above all, we have to get good at asking the right questions, because if we’re sitting there asking questions that we can’t impact or are doing nothing to change — I mean, I’ve talked with you before about my great friend Ashley Smith and she always says, you know, “If you face a problem, you have to say something about it, do something about it, or get over it.” And I love that idea, because with unanswered questions, “Okay, go learn about it. Go do something. Have the courage to change it, to get the answer.” Or, I would just say stop worrying so much about it if it’s not something that you can control anyway.

DUCKWORTH: I recently read this article by two psychologists, Jessica Alquist and Roy Baumeister. And it’s called “Learning to Love Uncertainty.” And it was just published. It’s in my favorite journal, honestly, which is Current Directions in Psychological Science — partly because the questions that are addressed in these little articles in this journal that I love are interesting, and partly because they’re just short. They don’t go on for pages and pages.

MAUGHAN: Short answers are much more likely to be digested.

DUCKWORTH: Exactly. So, I think the article does a good job of beginning with the fact that, in their words, “Uncertainty has a negative reputation. Not knowing what has happened or is going to happen is typically depicted as undesirable, and people often seek to minimize and avoid it.” But they go on to say that you can learn to love it. And I don’t know if this is what NBA players are doing, but they basically point out that the benefits of being in a state of uncertainty are great. So, for example, it tends to focus your attention. You are more engaged when you’re like, “Oh, wait, what is that?” You know, it’s the nature of surprise. It’s the nature of curiosity. Like, if you’re sure of something, your mind just wanders off to pay attention to something else. So, in making the case for uncertainty being a good thing, that was one of the things that I found convincing.

MAUGHAN: Now, I also want to acknowledge that there are obvious times when uncertainty is the worst. I mean, think about if you have a, a family member who’s lost hiking and the uncertainty of what’s happened to them, or the uncertainty when you’re waiting to get the results back from a medical test that could be quite serious. That’s torture. So, I’m not saying that in all things uncertainty is important. I think there are those examples for sure where it’s awful. And I think that generally speaking, this craving for certainty maybe sometimes puts us in a position where we’re not learning as much or making the best decisions or asking the right questions that will get us to a perhaps, more optimal state. The one thing I do find helpful when it comes to unanswered questions on things that we can know or that will be coming into the future — be that A.I., or geopolitical events, or whatever — is taking some peace in the things that I already do know. And I know this sounds cheesy and maybe Pollyanna-ish, but, like, for as crazy as the world is and as anxiety-producing as certain things can be, I also take great comfort in, again, what I do know. I know that I have a family, or a chosen family, or friends, whatever someone’s situation is, who love me and who I love. I know that if I want to, I can engage and learn from the greatest minds on the planet, now or in the past, through books that they’ve written, or through speeches, or podcasts, whatever that is, right? In the midst of everything I don’t know, there are things that I definitely do.

Still to come on No Stupid Questions: what should we do with life’s big, existential questions?

MAUGHAN: “I don’t know. I can’t figure it out. Leave me alone.” 

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Now, back to Mike and Angela’s conversation about unanswered questions.

DUCKWORTH: I have been reading a couple of books lately on these existential questions. And I’ve been reading two in particular, one better known than the other — partly because one has been published and the other one hasn’t. But one of these books is Man’s Search for Meaning. Now, Mike, there’s no way that you have not read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, correct?

MAUGHAN: And read it several times. This goes back to: it’s, it’s short and full of great punch.

DUCKWORTH: Well, it’s not as short as a Current Directions in Psychological Science article, but it’s very short. The other book, which is much longer and unpublished, Start Making Sense: How Existential Psychology Can Help Us Build Meaningful Lives in Absurd Times, is really on the same topic. It’s a book by Steve Heine, who’s one of my favorite psychologists. He’s at University of British Columbia. It’s coming out in January, 2025. But Heine actually references Frankl more than, I think, two or three dozen times in the book. I mean, really what I want to say about these two books is that they take as the big question: what is life all about? What is the nature of human existence?

MAUGHAN: Small topics.

DUCKWORTH: Yeah, so this is why I want to turn — I want to turn ourselves from, like, “Yeah, it’s good to have curiosity about, like, things that you don’t know” — and, like, you know, maybe there’s different kinds of things that you can’t know, like your three categories. But this is, I guess, that third category, right? Like, maybe, “the big question.”

MAUGHAN: Right, and I’m excited to learn from you what the purpose of life is.

DUCKWORTH: Well, I am no Viktor Frankl, but I am now an amateur devotee. So, Viktor Frankl was a Viennese psychiatrist. I think he was a younger contemporary of Freud. I know, though, for a fact that one of the things that made Frankl important is that he rejected, Freud’s pleasure principle, which is that, you know, what everyone seeks, like what life is all about, is seeking pleasure and relief from pain. What Frankl said — and he said this before he became a captive of the Auschwitz concentration camps, and that is actually what the narrative of Man’s Search for Meaning is. It’s a story of when he was in the concentration camps and how he survived, and what he observed: like seeing all of this through the lens of somebody who is really a therapist and a psychiatrist. And it was before this Auschwitz experience where Frankl said that when he would see people in his care, who would come to him deeply anxious, lonely, depressed, even psychotic, what the cure was in so many cases was not pleasure, was not power, was not prestige, it wasn’t even relief from pain. It was meaning. And he called this approach to therapy “logotherapy,” because in Greek “logo” — like, you know, Nike has a logo, all your favorite brands have logos — the word in Greek means “meaning.” So, it was “meaning therapy.” What we all are seeking is meaning.

MAUGHAN: But, just to summarize quick; Freud’s basic thing was that we, in life, seek pleasure above all else. And Frankl is saying above all else, we must seek meaning.

DUCKWORTH: Yeah, I don’t want to oversimplify Freud, because Freud had, of course, like, lots of things to say about the nature of human nature. But he did have the pleasure principle, and he did think that, you know, we have a need for pleasure. And Frankl did reject that. I reread Man’s Search for Meaning and was reminded that in the English edition, after he describes his experience in Auschwitz, there is, like, a second part. It’s almost like an extended postscript, and it is called “Logotherapy in a Nutshell.”And I’ll read to you from “Logotherapy in a Nutshell,” because you cannot paraphrase Frankl. Like, he’s too good. So, here is Frankl actually quoting Nietzsche, the German philosopher, and says this: “There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche. ‘He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.’” And then, he goes on a few sentences later to say, “Thus, it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension: the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become.” He says, “What man actually needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.”

 MAUGHAN: I mean, “the striving or struggling for a worthwhile task.” I would just say that I have seen so many people over the course of my life that achieve some sort of goal that they set out for, and it almost destroys them.

DUCKWORTH: Give me an example.

MAUGHAN: So, you have someone who started a business and sells it and they make a bunch of money. And they thought the goal was: build this big business, sell it, and get rich. What I have seen many times is that it’s actually the pursuit — I mean, he talks about man’s “search” for meaning. We read in the Declaration of Independence: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” right? We fool ourselves into thinking that this destination, when I reach this goal — I think it was Matt Damon who talked about: he was so grateful that he won an Academy Award so early in his career because he got home from the Oscars with his Academy Award and was like, “Wait a minute. Some people spend their entire career chasing this?” And once you have it, you realize it’s not anything. It’s the pursuit of it. It’s the goal. It’s the striving that really brings the meaning, not the accomplishment itself. And so, I love when you read, you know, “the striving or struggle for a worthwhile task,” because it’s not the accomplishment, is what I’ve seen over and over. It’s the actual process. And if you do summit one mountain, then you better find another mountain to climb next. Because otherwise, once you hit the peak, it’s like, “Okay, now what?”

DUCKWORTH: I think this is why it’s provocative, right? Because one view would be that, like, what you’re seeking in life is safety and comfort, like a state of — Frankl would say, like, homeostasis, like everything being fine. He was like, “No, the optimal state of being is a state of tension.” I have this article that I have not yet written — well, I’ve half-written it, — with some friends and collaborators and I, you know, propose that happiness is the pursuit. When I’m happiest, I am in the pursuit of a goal that’s meaningful and it’s going well. I’m extremely unhappy when I’m in the pursuit of a goal and it’s not going well or worst of all is, like, I don’t know what the goal is. But I really do believe that it is the “state of tension”, as Frankl puts it. And that’s why I think he answers the question like, what is life all about? Life is about the pursuit of meaning. You know, you can ascertain that meaning might be some version of being connected to and in service to something larger than yourself and people other than yourself. This is why Frankl also liked the term “self-transcendence.” It’s not about you. Your attention needs to be beyond. But the idea that, like, what you’re seeking in life is not a state of comfort and resolution. It’s like, the game is: ask a question, answer it, ask another question, answer it.

MAUGHAN: But that we’re seeking a life of tension, which is exactly the opposite, I think, of what most people, including me, would initially imagine.

DUCKWORTH: And I have to say that Frankl must have been some extraordinary person well before surviving Auschwitz and later authoring, I think, like, over 30 books and, I mean, lived into his 90s. He was a beloved father, grandfather. But when he was 16 years old — 16! — he was already taking university-level coursework. And his precocity, his sort of, like, obvious intellect attracted attention of, I think, one of his professors. And he was invited to give a little lecture, you know, not in a huge lecture hall. I think it was some, like, adult education workshop. But at 16 years old, he delivered a lecture on the meaning of life.

MAUGHAN: I love the audacity of that a little bit.

DUCKWORTH: I know, right? And he told the audience, “It is we ourselves who must answer the questions that life asks of us. And to these questions, we can respond only by being responsible for our existence.” What 16-year-old stands up in a group of strangers and holds forth in that way. When I was 16 years old, I had some kind of essay assignment, and I wrote a paper whose title was “The Meaning of Life.” And one of my embarrassments is that when I compare what I wrote to this profound sort of, like, “life asks us the questions” — like I wrote, and I think Frankl would have vigorously disagreed with me — I wrote when I was 16 that the meaning of life was happiness. I think this, like, idea that Frankl had is that, like, no, that is not what you’re seeking. You are not seeking pleasure. You’re not seeking happiness. And you’re not even seeking the permanent resolution of questions. You are seeking more seeking. And I think Frankl had this idea that at every moment in our lives, we are being asked, like, “What are you doing? What are you connected to? What is your work? Who does your work serve? How are you being responsible?” So, it’s a kind of a turning of the tables because instead of you being the person who’s asking the questions, you are answering the questions that life is asking you.

MAUGHAN: I think it’s really beautiful, and I think, you know there are so many of these existential questions that we face. Obviously, I think maybe the existential question is, “What’s the purpose of life?” I think that there are other also kind of unanswerable or maybe unknowable questions. I take comfort in maybe different answers to them. So, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Stephen Colbert do kind of — he has these set questions that he’ll ask guests.

DUCKWORTH: Is this on The Colbert Report? I think I’m dating myself by, like, not knowing what Stephen Colbert has done since The Colbert Report.

MAUGHAN: No, I think it’s on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. A very famous clip is when he’s asking Keanu Reeves — he asks this question a lot — “What do you think happens after we die?” Which is one of these big questions we sit with. And he asked Keanu Reeves, and Keanu Reeves sits there and pauses. And then he says, “The people who love us miss us.” And to me it was so profound because I think sometimes it’s easy to get really caught up in the big, unknowing nature of some of these questions. I at least had never considered that question that way. I think it’s been a lesson to me on some of these big, existential-type questions that there are also just practical, everyday answers that bring even a different sense of meaning. When you say, “The people who love us miss us,” it reminds me, okay, I don’t know exactly what happens when we die, but I do know that there’s a great importance to loving people while we’re here. I love, and I think this is silly, so forgive it, but James Taylor has a song where he asks, “What is the secret to life?” And in the song, the lyrics go, “Enjoying the passage of time.” Now, I think I would modify that to more what you’ve talked about with Frankl —

DUCKWORTH: Right, because that sounds like the pleasure principle to me. Maybe when he sings it, it’s totally different.

MAUGHAN: And I’m not singing it. But here’s what I loved about it was this idea that sometimes the existential questions to me become so big that they’re almost like this crushing thing. Like, “I don’t know. I can’t figure it out. Leave me alone.” Right? And when I instead think about it in the way James Taylor talked about it, “enjoying the passage of time” — again, I would say, “finding meaning in the passage of time” or, “service to others in the passage of time” — For some reason it clicked in me, though, that, like, life really is just a series of every single day. And if I can have a moment every single day where I find meaning, where I’m of service to others, whatever that is, and instead of thinking about everything in terms of years, and decades, and centuries, and all these other things, right?

DUCKWORTH: You’re thinking about moments. 

MAUGHAN: Yeah! To me, it was — it was a way to just be like, “Hey, pause.” I don’t know everything that’s going to happen. I don’t know the meaning of life. I don’t know all of that stuff. But I do know that if I can do something meaningful today — because today is all you have. I know these sound so trite. I hate even saying them out loud. I feel like I’m, like, reading a trite book of rando sayings. But does that make sense? I don’t know. For me, it kind of changed how I think about the existential.

DUCKWORTH: Well, maybe you should read Steve Heine’s book.

MAUGHAN: Well, maybe it should come out and I will.

DUCKWORTH: Yeah. Well, it’ll definitely come out. I can resolve that uncertainty. It will definitely come out because I read the galley copies. And I want to say that in a way it is picking up where Viktor Frankl left off. There is a science now of the kinds of things that Viktor Frankl wrote about as someone who saw a lot of individuals in his clinic and made observations. But now, there are, dare I say, more rigorous, reliable ways of coming to scientific fact. And Steve Heine, as somebody who has kind of mastered the skill set of an experimental psychologist and has thought about human nature for a long time, you know, in this book, he kind of picks up these questions of, like, what makes life meaningful. And two things in particular, I think, are less known about Viktor Frankl’s philosophy, this “logotherapy” and come out in the modern research as well. So, I think what most people understand that book to be about is how you can find meaning through your noble response to suffering. You know, if there’s a one liner for Man’s Search for Meaning, that’s the one liner that, like, ChatGPT would give you. It’s like, “Oh, it’s a book about how even in the abyss of despair, and being humiliated, and tortured, like, the nobility of your response, like, that is a form of meaning.” But there were two other paths to meaning that Frankl laid out, and both of them Steve Heine writes about and then adds the modern research. And one of them is your close relationships. It’s your loving relationships. This is the path that I think Keanu Reeves was talking about. The writer Raymond Carver, the last poem in his last book when he was dying at age 50 and which was inscribed on his tombstone: “And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved. To feel myself beloved on the earth.” And when Frankl writes about it, he says that, you know, the reason why this is a path to meaning is that to truly love another person, to truly be connected to that other person, you not only love them unconditionally for who they are, but you love them for who they can be. And so, again, I’m always seeing this movement in his work. It’s about the future. It’s about supporting that person to actualize the potential that they haven’t yet actualized to be maybe an improved version of themselves. And then, if you read Heine, there’s an urgency to this, because Heine musters a lot of solid evidence that we’re not doing this very well, that we’re spending less time with each other, with the people that we love. And the urgency of like, you know, rediscovering this path to meaning is one of the things that I took out of the book that I was like, oh, yeah, that’s perennially true, supported by recent science, and also one of the challenges of, like, our generation.

MAUGHAN: I love so much what you just said. Remind me whose gravestone that was?

DUCKWORTH: Raymond Carver. He was this, like, tragic American short-story writer. And I say “tragic” because he — yeah, he lived hard, man. He, like, was a raging alcoholic and had a lot of challenges in his life. But he wrote beautifully. And that is quite literally the last poem in his last book. And it is the inscription on his tombstone.

MAUGHAN: The reason I love it — “did you get out of life what you wanted?” I think one of the other big questions that we face is: what do I want? And I think so many people, myself included, can’t fully answer that question or haven’t fully answered that question. Charles Krauthammer was a journalist who appeared on television and wrote in The Washington Post. He died, I think it was of cancer. And he wrote one final piece in The Post. And I have it framed in my home, because I think it was so powerful. He says this in the end. He said, “I leave this life with no regrets. It was a wonderful life. Full and complete with the great loves and great endeavors that make it worth living. I’m sad to leave, but I leave with the knowledge that I lived the life that I intended.” And Carver sort of says that same thing on his tombstone. And one of the great big questions I wish I could better answer is: what do I want? And I think that I want to always be striving. I want to find meaning. A life that’s larger than self and in service to others. I think that’s what I want. And I probably need to take time asking myself that question a little better so I can more thoroughly define it. Because I would love to say, like Krauthammer in the end, “I’m sad to leave, but I leave with the knowledge that I lived the life that I intended.” And I think that comes down to asking and answering that question.

DUCKWORTH: So, there was a third path to meaning that Frankl lays out. It’s not how you handle suffering, and it’s not your connections to your loved ones. It’s your work. It’s your deeds. In modern times, it’s, like, your professional work, but you could also argue, like, your avocations or your volunteer work. But this, of course, strikes very close to home, because this is all I do as a psychologist, right? Like, I study achievement. I study what people are striving toward in terms of their goals. I will say that, again, you know, if you read Steve Heine’s summary of the modern research that when you have professional goals, they are, of course, themselves rewarding in that you can feel like you are mastering skills, that you are competent. But the research is quite clear that when you ask people about their different goals, they offer up lots of reasons for why they’re doing, you know, what they’re doing. And sometimes those are being more self-sufficient, sometimes it’s about, like, oh, I’m trying to be happy, I’m trying to acquire wealth. But it is the purposes that are really other-centered, you know, self-transcendent that lead to meaning. And the modern research supports what Frankl would say, which is, like, “You want to look forward and you want to look outward. You want to be a happier person? Don’t work on happiness.” “You have a lot of problems yourself, you want to solve them? Stop solving your own problems.” Like, you cannot have the goal to be a happy person, but you can have the goal to serve someone else, and then success and happiness ensue. So anyway, there’s so much nuance here, but I think to, me, when I read Heine’s new book, when I read Frankl’s iconic Man’s Search for Meaning, it is all about questions that you keep trying to answer. It is about goals, but not that all goals are created equal. So, you know, I read these two books wondering whether I’d have my big questions answered, and I actually do think I got answers. And yet, Mike, and I think maybe this is where we’ve come to, there are no questions whose answers do not lead to yet more questions.

MAUGHAN: And I think, Angela Duckworth, that is the beauty of all of this — that there are so many questions. There are questions that we can explore forever. In all of these things, I just want to say how grateful I am to have had the opportunity to answer so many questions with you and leave all of these conversations with so many more. And I know I speak for both of us when I just say that we want to thank you, our listeners. You’ve invited us into your homes and your lives these past several years. You’ve sent in so many questions that we’ve answered, and tried to answer, and so many more that we weren’t able to get to. And we wanted to just thank you for being willing to go on this amazing journey with us.

DUCKWORTH: And to end, to sign off, I think we go back to the beginning of this conversation, Mike. What do you do with unanswered questions? You keep asking.

Coming up after the break: a fact-check of today’s episode and reflections about No Stupid Questions from our listeners.

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And now, here’s a fact-check of today’s conversation:

Angela speculates that the Serenity Prayer, which dates from the early 1930s, may be the most famous prayer in the world. That’s unlikely. “The Lord’s Prayer” from the Christian Bible — which begins with: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name” — has been recited and sung across Christian denominations for centuries. And practicing Muslims recite specific verses of the Quran five times a day, so it’s possible that an Islamic prayer, or “salat,” is the most well-known globally.

Also, according to the official Viktor Frankl Institute in Vienna, Frankl delivered his first public lecture on the meaning of life at 15 — not 16.

Later, Angela mispronounces the name of Comedy Central’s former news satire show The Colbert Report. The “t” at the end of “report” is silent — a play on Stephen Colbert’s surname, which also ends with a silent “t.”

Finally, Mike is slightly wrong about the lyrics from James Taylor’s 1977 song “Secret O’ Life.” It’s not, “What is the secret of life? / Enjoying the passage of time.” But rather, “The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.”

That’s it for the fact-check.

Before we wrap today’s episode, and the show as a whole, let’s hear some thoughts and reflections from our NSQ listeners.

Lori HUSKEY-KORAB: Hello, Angela and Mike. I’ve been a long-time listener and I’m deeply saddened to see you go. I’m in my 40s, and Angela’s voice was one of the first I ever heard, literally. I grew up deaf and couldn’t listen to any kind of radio or spoken content. After receiving my cochlear implant in my late 30s, I first heard you being interviewed on Freakonomics. I followed you and Stephen to NSQ and have been a devoted listener ever since. Angela, your voice has played a remarkable role in my auditory journey. After my surgery, my audiologist encouraged me to listen to as many podcasts as possible to rehabilitate my hearing. I was so fortunate to discover your voice. It’s pitch and tone perfectly clear to me. Both you and Mike have delivered content that is riveting, and all the while your voices helped me reclaim my ability to hear. Thank you. 

Jay: No Stupid Questions has been such an important part of my life these past couple of years. I’ve had countless mornings where I’d be in the car with my dad on our way to school and we’d listen to the show together. We’d also send each other links to episodes we thought were especially insightful, and it became our shared ritual. Even after moving abroad that hasn’t changed. The show has stayed with me and has become a constant amidst changes in environment and culture. So, I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who has made the podcast what it is, because there’s no doubt that your voices and your insights have shaped the way I think and speak, and I’m genuinely grateful for that. 

Lianne WAPPETT: Hi NSQ. This is Leanne, and I want to take a moment to chime in on your last episode. First, thank you. I’ve used several of your episodes as springboards for my own class discussions, even assigning some of my students to listen so that we can spark some thoughtful dialogue. I can’t say I have a single favorite episode, but I will definitely miss Rebecca’s fact-checking segments. On that note, I can’t help but wonder, does Rebecca now have time to fact-check my life? 

That was, respectively, Lori Huskey-Korab, a listener who would like to be known as “Jay,” and Lianne Wappett. Thanks to them and to everyone who shared their stories. We are so grateful to you for coming along this journey with us. And Lianne — feel free to reach out to me about fact-checking your life on a freelance basis.

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No Stupid Questions is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio, People I (Mostly) Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things. All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. The senior producer of the show is me, Rebecca Lee Douglas, and Lyric Bowditch is our production associate. This episode was mixed by Greg Rippin with help from Jason Gambrell. We had research assistance from Daniel Moritz-Rabson. Our theme song was composed by Luis Guerra. To learn more, or to read episode transcripts, visit Freakonomics.com/NSQ. Thanks for listening!

DUCKWORTH: I actually have had these, like, weird flying dreams recently.

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Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner again. I’d like to congratulate Angela and Mike on making so many great episodes of No Stupid Questions; I’d like to thank you for listening — and remind you that next week, right here in your feed, we’ll start replaying the entire series from the beginning, more than 200 episodes. So: if you never heard those earlier episodes — they’ll seem brand new to you. And if you have heard them — well, you’ll be able to sing along, just like Rocky Horror or Wicked. We’ll be listening for you. That’s starting next week. Until then, take care of yourself and, if you can, someone else too.