What Happens When We Stop Asking Why?
“Because that’s just how it is.”
I must have been seven when I first heard this phrase—the great conversation ender, the final period at the end of inquiry, the moment when wonder went to die. I had been asking why the sky was blue, and then why light worked that way, and then why anything worked any way at all, following the infinite chain of causation that children instinctively understand leads everywhere and nowhere.
But the adult world, I learned, has little patience for infinite chains. It prefers the comfort of full stops.
When did we learn to stop asking “why” and start accepting “because”? When did curiosity become inconvenience, questioning become annoyance, wonder become something to be managed rather than encouraged?
I watch my eleven-year-old son navigate the world through an endless series of questions: “Why do people get married? Why do they get divorced? Why do some people have more money than others? Why do we have to die? Why don’t we remember being babies?” Each question opens into ten more questions, like nested Russian dolls of inquiry stretching toward some ultimate mystery.
But I see the moment approaching when someone will tell him, with the gentle firmness of adult wisdom, that some questions don’t have answers, that some things are just the way they are, that it’s time to stop asking and start accepting.
The tragedy isn’t that all questions have answers—they don’t. The tragedy is that we teach children to stop asking the questions that matter most, the ones that keep the world alive and mysterious and full of possibility.
We don’t do this maliciously. We do it because unexamined acceptance is easier than perpetual questioning. It’s exhausting to live in a state of constant curiosity, to hold everything lightly enough that it could be otherwise, to resist the comfort of settled truth.
But somewhere in the shift from “why” to “because,” we lose something essential. We lose the recognition that most of what we accept as inevitable is actually contingent, that most of what we consider natural is actually constructed, that most of what seems permanent is actually changeable.
Children ask “why” not because they expect final answers but because they understand intuitively that reality is far stranger and more malleable than it appears. They haven’t yet learned the adult skill of making peace with mystery by pretending it isn’t mysterious.
“Why do we have to go to school?” becomes “Because education is important” instead of an exploration of how societies organize learning, what purposes schooling serves, how knowledge gets transmitted, what alternatives might exist.
“Why can’t I stay up late?” becomes “Because you need sleep” instead of a conversation about circadian rhythms, social conventions around childhood, the relationship between rest and growth, the arbitrary nature of many boundaries.
“Why do people hurt each other?” becomes “Because some people are bad” instead of an inquiry into pain and fear and the systems that shape human behavior.
We replace curiosity with categories, wonder with worn-out wisdom, questions with conclusions. We teach children that the adult world has figured things out, when the truth is that the adult world has simply gotten tired of figuring things out.
But what if we’re wrong? What if the questions children ask—the ones we dismissively label as naive or impossible to answer—are actually the most important questions we can ask? What if “why” is not a phase to be outgrown but a practice to be cultivated?
The most innovative thinkers, the ones who reshape how we understand reality, are usually the ones who never stopped asking childlike questions. They maintained beginner’s mind in expert territory, kept wondering “why” even after everyone else had settled on “because.”
Einstein asked why time feels constant when physics suggests it’s relative. Darwin asked why species looked designed when no designer was apparent. Freud asked why rational beings behave so irrationally.
These weren’t childish questions—they were questions only someone with childlike curiosity would dare to ask, questions that assumed the world was stranger and more interesting than conventional wisdom suggested.
I think about the moment I stopped asking certain kinds of questions, when I learned to accept explanations that didn’t really explain, when I started performing understanding rather than genuinely seeking it. It happened gradually, like losing a language from disuse.
But sitting with my son as he peppers me with impossible questions, I feel something reawakening—not the need to have answers, but the permission to keep asking, to hold the world lightly enough that it could always surprise me.
Tonight, when he asks why we dream, I won’t say “because your brain processes information while you sleep.” I’ll say “I don’t know, but let’s think about it together. What do you think dreams are for?”
Because maybe the death of curiosity isn’t inevitable. Maybe we can choose to keep asking “why” even after the world tells us to accept “because.” Maybe wonder isn’t something we outgrow—it’s something we can decide to keep alive.
The sky is blue because of light scattering. But why is there light at all? Why is there anything instead of nothing? Why are we here to see it?
Some questions don’t have answers. But they have something better—they have the power to keep us awake to mystery, to keep us human in a world that’s always trying to convince us we’ve figured everything out.