I have a list. It isn't written anywhere. It lives in the back of my skull, showing up at 2am, in traffic, mid-sentence, in the shower. A list of questions that have no satisfying answers — and probably never will. I used to think that was a problem. Now I think it might be the entire point.
So here they are. All of them. In no particular order, with no apology for the chaos.
On existence, before and after
The universe is roughly 13.8 billion years old. Before the Big Bang — before that first fraction of a second — there was, as far as anyone can tell, nothing. Not empty space. Not darkness. Not silence. Nothing. No time. No place for time to exist in.
Physicists call this the "first cause problem." It has been bothering philosophers since before physics was a thing. And here's the truly uncomfortable part: the human brain physically cannot imagine genuine nothingness. Try it right now. Every time you picture "nothing," you're picturing a dark empty room — which is still something. Our minds were built to navigate a world of objects, causes, and consequences. We were not built for the question of why there is something rather than nothing.
"Every time you picture 'nothing,' you're picturing a dark empty room — which is still something."
I believe in God the same way I also don't believe in God. Not because I'm confused — but because both feel true at different moments. The more I look at how impossibly fine-tuned existence seems to be (the precise strength of gravity, the exact charge of an electron, the fact that stars forge the atoms in your blood), the harder it is to call it accident. And yet. The same evidence that makes creation feel designed also makes it feel impersonal, mechanical, indifferent. Take your pick.
On matter — the fact that you're made of planet
Here is something that doesn't get said enough: you are the Earth, briefly wearing a human shape.
The calcium in your bones came from ancient seabeds. The iron in your blood was forged in a star that exploded before the Sun was born. The sodium in your tears, the magnesium running your enzymes, the oxygen filling your lungs right now — all of it was cycled through rock, ocean, soil, and living things before it became you. You eat the Earth. You drink it. Eventually, you return to it.
Every atom in your body will be replaced over the course of your life. The cells in your skin die and regenerate in weeks. Your red blood cells last about 120 days. Even your bones — which feel so permanent — are completely replaced roughly every decade. This raises a question that has haunted philosophers since Heraclitus stepped in a river:
On entropy — why everything ages
The second law of thermodynamics says that disorder always increases over time. Systems run down. Ice melts. Stars burn out. Cells accumulate damage they can no longer repair.
Eventually — on a long enough timeline — the universe itself will reach a state of maximum entropy called heat death: no gradients, no movement, no life, no time in any meaningful sense. Just a cold, uniform sameness spread across infinite space.
I keep landing on the same place: maybe things matter precisely because they end. A song that lasted forever would not be a song — it would be noise. The fact that you will die is the same fact that makes today a real day. Entropy doesn't mean nothing matters. It means you have to decide what does.
On the body — its strange specific designs
Why is human blood red? The answer is haemoglobin — a protein that uses iron to carry oxygen, and iron, when bound to oxygen, is red. But octopus blood is blue (copper-based). Some worms have green blood. The colour of your blood is a historical accident of which metal your ancestors' protein happened to use first.
On the tyranny of pairs
Look at bilateral symmetry. Two eyes. Two ears. Two hands, two legs, two lungs, two kidneys, two hemispheres of the brain. In almost every complex animal, the body is split down a central axis into two mirrored halves.
Depth perception. Two slightly different images, combined, let you judge distance — crucial for catching prey and not falling off things.
Sound localisation. A tiny delay between when a sound reaches each ear tells your brain which direction it came from.
Redundancy. Lose one, you survive. Evolution pays the cost of building two against the survival benefit of a backup.
Because bilateral symmetry is easier to evolve than asymmetry, and the body plan that won the lottery 550 million years ago happened to be symmetrical.
On consciousness — the question that breaks everything
Neuroscience can tell you which brain regions activate when you feel fear. It can trace the electrical cascade that produces a thought. What it cannot tell you is why any of that feels like something. Why there is an "inside" to experience at all.
Philosophers call this the "hard problem of consciousness." You could describe every neuron firing when someone sees red, and still not explain why red looks the way it does. Sleep is part of this mystery too — humans spend a third of their lives unconscious, and we still don't know why we dream.
On being alone — or not
The Milky Way contains roughly 200 to 400 billion stars. The observable universe contains roughly two trillion galaxies. If even a tiny fraction of star systems produced life, the number of living worlds would be incomprehensibly large. And yet — silence.
I don't think we're alone. Not because I have evidence — but because the alternative requires that out of all that space and time, we're the only ones who made it to curiosity. The honest position is: we have no idea. And we might never know.
On birth, death, grief — and why we cry at both
Every human who has ever lived arrived the same way: unwillingly, loudly, into cold air and bright lights, after being evicted from the only home they had ever known. The cry of a newborn is not happiness. It is shock.
And at the other end: grief. The cry at a funeral is not so different from the cry at a birth — it is also shock. The person was here. Now they are not. The same neurons that built a model of them, that learned their voice and their habits — those neurons fire into absence. Grief is love with nowhere to go.
On light, sound, gravity, magnetism — forces that have no face
The equations describe what happens. They don't explain why those equations, and not some other ones, are the rules.
On DNA — the instruction manual that edits itself
Every cell in your body contains about 3 billion base pairs of DNA — a molecule so long that if unspooled from a single cell, it would stretch two metres. You have around 37 trillion cells. End to end, enough DNA to reach the Sun and back roughly 60 times.
We don't know. And that might be the most important sentence in this entire essay.
The point of asking
I began this list thinking it might have an end. It doesn't. Every answer reveals three more questions beneath it. That used to frustrate me. Now I think it's the most honest thing about being alive — that the universe is genuinely, structurally, irreducibly mysterious.
The questions I can't stop asking are not problems to be solved. They're signs that I'm paying attention.
And paying attention, I think, might be the whole job.
If one of these questions keeps you up at night too — write to me. I'd like to know which one.