About The Questioner

First of all, welcome.

I began The Questioner as an outlet for my writing. For me, writing is a tool for understanding the world and making sense of thoughts. Consequently, no subject is off-topic, but you may notice that the essays and articles here gravitate towards areas where there is debate or what I would describe as ‘unjustifiable certainty’.

The reason for this is twofold. Firstly, my mind is such that it needs to resolve things, so I am naturally drawn to areas where incongruity or discord exists. Secondly, uncertainty is often where we find the greatest potential for growth and creativity. This is as true on a societal level as it is on the personal.

We all know how easy it is for us to engineer bubbles of certainty around ourselves, clustering into groups that share our attitudes, beliefs and perspectives. We convince ourselves that anyone who doesn’t reach the same conclusions as ourselves must be mistaken, or worse. Perhaps they are. But since they obviously think the same about us, to me that means there’s a possibility that it’s us who’s mistaken, not them.

Or it could be that both of us are missing something, but we’re all too wrapped up in our own perspectives to search outside our bubble for the truth. There’s even a possibility we’re both correct, and we’ve just been approaching things from different directions.

One thing is certain, though. We’ll never find out which is the case if we all ‘stay in our lane’, too afraid to ask questions, either of ourselves or of others. Where, then, would be our potential for growth?

So The Questioner is about starting from a place of ignorance. It’s about holding our own beliefs as temporary placeholders for knowledge, subjecting everything we think, say and do to the arbiter of truth. If we find ourselves offended during the course of our exploration together, it may be worth paying attention to those feelings. Because by questioning our feelings too, we can often learn what it is we truly value, and why.

Thank you for taking an interest in my writing.

Yours sincerely

Kurt L. Mahren