Question Spiral #1: What If We've Been Asking the Wrong Questions?

The Question Spiral
A Collaborative Writing Series for the Incurably Curious

Welcome to a six-week writing experiment built on wonder, not answers. In the Question Spiral, 5–7 writers take turns exploring big, unsettling, beautifully human questions, each one sparked by the last. There are no prompts, no blueprints, no neat conclusions. Just a living chain of curiosity, where each essay responds, provokes, and invites the next. It’s not a ladder. It’s a spiral. And we’re writing our way through it.

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The bailiff’s gavel echoed through the hall like a warning shot. Not that it mattered. The courtroom was already in disarray. The Witness was crying. The Defendant wouldn’t stop monologuing. And the Jury, twelve versions of the same person at different ages, kept changing their minds.

It wasn’t a courtroom built for justice. It was built for story.

On one side sat The Answer: bloated, overfed on self-help books and Instagram quotes, half-drunk on half-truths. On the other sat The Question: wiry, feral, and smirking like it had just broken into your house and rearranged all the furniture.

“Your Honor,” croaked the Answer, licking its lips. “We object to the Question’s tone.”

“What tone?” said the Question, blinking with mock innocence. “I only asked what you believed. You’re the one who dragged in your childhood trauma.”

And the jury, oh, the jury. A 9-year-old boy who still believed in magic. A 15-year-old girl who didn’t believe in anything. A 32-year-old man with tired eyes and two mortgages. An 84-year-old woman who had stopped believing in questions altogether. They didn’t speak. They didn’t need to. Their silence was louder than any verdict.

This is what happens when you live too long in a world obsessed with certainty. The questions become dangerous. Not the shallow ones, the easy ones, the ones they hand you in job interviews or dating apps. No. I mean the ones that claw their way up through the holes in the earth. The ones that haunt you longer than any answer ever stayed.

The ones that don’t ask for clarity.
They ask what you buried to feel safe.

Let’s back up.

A friend once asked me a simple question over coffee: “Do you think you’re happy?”

I said yes. But it tasted like a lie.

Later, I realized the problem wasn’t my answer. It was the question. It came from a framework where happiness was the goal, where emotion could be measured, where satisfaction was a finish line. But what if the deeper truth wasn’t a yes or no? What if the real question was:

"What have you accepted as 'enough' that quietly broke you?"

We live in a culture obsessed with fixing things. Therapy. Podcasts. Productivity tools. Everyone’s looking for the right question to unlock the door. But what if the lock was fake? What if you were never supposed to open the door, just burn the house down and build something better?

The Question Spiral isn’t about discovery. It’s about unraveling.

Each writer here is going to pick up the last person’s thread and pull. Not neatly. Not politely. Like a child undoing a sweater just to see what happens. You won’t get tidy answers here. You’ll get friction. You’ll get mirrors. You’ll get that feeling when someone says something you’ve never heard before but somehow already knew.

The old questions don’t work anymore.

“Where do you see yourself in five years?”

Hell if I know.

I used to think I was a blueprint. Now I think I’m a bonfire.

So let’s ask better. Let’s stop pretending we can map the human experience with bullet points and spreadsheets and 12-step plans.

Let’s ask:

"When did you stop being curious about your own life?"

"What part of yourself have you convinced others doesn’t need saving?"

"Who benefits when you pretend you're fine?"

These aren’t answers looking for explanations. These are flares. Wild, chaotic things.

And I’ve learned.

There are questions that decorate a conversation. And there are questions that rupture the ground beneath our very feet.

I want the cracks.

The ones that let the light in, yes, but also the ones that let the monsters out. Because they live in you, too. The ones you hide behind routines and smiles and knowing the right thing to say.

Maybe the point isn’t to cage them.
Maybe the point is to finally ask the question that sets them free.

I once thought wisdom was knowing the answers.

But I’m starting to think it’s knowing how to live with a question so deep it echoes through everything. A question so true it terrifies you.

So here’s mine:

Who would you be if no one had ever rewarded your restraint?

That’s where we begin.

Your turn Andrea Hoffmann see ya in a few days with the answer!