Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions in Times of Uncertainty

Are we headed for a recession? Will long-standing political institutions and norms fall? Will the public policies our families and communities rely on be there in the coming years? Are my basic political rights going to change?

Today, Americans face a near-avalanche of uncertainty about major social, economic, and political questions. In the midst of this public uncertainty, they continue to navigate the big, deep, and personal questions people have asked themselves throughout history. What is my purpose in life? Am I ever going to find happiness? Does what I do even matter? Will I leave a legacy? They also navigate the everyday life questions that feel both urgent and daunting. Should I change careers? Should I have a child?

“Should we get a divorce?” Elizabeth Weingarten asked her husband in 2021, as he sat down beside her with a steaming mug of coffee.

So began Weingarten’s journey to understand not only how to ask the right questions about her life, but how to live with the questions that cannot be answered now or possibly ever. Weingarten sought to understand, as the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it, how to “try to love the questions themselves,” and “For now, live the questions,” so that “maybe, gradually, without your realizing it, some far-off day you will live your way into the answer.”

Weingarten worked at the Better Life Lab between 2015 and 2019, where she directed the Global Gender Parity Initiative, a research and storytelling project raising public awareness of the impact of gender inequality in unpaid labor and gender mainstreaming, and served as a senior fellow. You can read more about the project in the archives here.

In her new book, How to Fall in Love With Questions: A New Way to Thrive in Times of Uncertainty, Weingarten offers a timely roadmap for asking the questions her research and reporting suggest will help us to love and live with our own questions, even amidst deep uncertainty.

Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Haley Swenson: I'm curious to know about your journey from the Better Life Lab to writing a book about uncertainty and the science of questions. What led you here?

Elizabeth Weingarten: When I left the Better Life Lab, I started working at the behavioral design consultancy ideas42. That was because while I was working at New America, I started to become really intrigued by questions around human behavior and why we do the things that we do. That was a direct result of a speaker who came to New America and a book that I read as a result, by Iris Bohnet, called What Works: Gender Equality by Design.

I'd been trying to use reporting to address the pernicious gender inequality challenges in the workplace. Iris Bohnet's book opened my eyes to this whole world of behavioral science, and the idea that fixing these problems is not just about sharing ideas and reporting the way that I had been, but also about changing the context, or environment, in which we behave. I started writing and researching all that I could on behavioral science, and I became the managing editor of a magazine called Behavioral Scientist. Meanwhile, in my personal life, I was going on a lot of dates and kept having this experience where men would not ask me a single question for the entire date.

At first, it was demoralizing, but then it made me curious: Were there gender differences in question-asking? I ended up doing some reporting on the intersection of question-asking and identity, and began to learn that questions aren't just important when we're dating. They are an interpersonal superpower, one that is often undervalued in a culture like ours, which really values the answers above everything else. The more I dug into questions as unsung heroes in our lives, the more interested I became in them.

And then something happened again in my personal life that completely transformed my perspective on questions. I decided to leave that job to pursue a creative project. At the same time, I had recently gotten married, and this was early in the pandemic. I reached this point in my life, spring of 2021, where both these things were failing, this creative project that I was trying to start and my marriage, and I found myself facing these big, heavy questions: Did I marry the right person? Should I get a divorce? What am I doing with my life? What is my purpose, and will I ever find the success that I'm looking for as a creative person?

It was around that time that I found a book called Letters to a Young Poet, a book of correspondence between the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and an aspiring poet Franz Kappus. Starting in 1903, Kappus is asking Rilke all sorts of questions about how to live his life and Rilke responds back, very famously, not by telling him the answers, but by saying that he wants to encourage him to try to start to love the questions themselves as if they were, as if they were locked rooms or books written in a foreign tongue.

And Haley, when I read those words, I loved them, but they kind of baffled me in a way, because I had become both this person who revered questions in my professional life, and yet in many areas of my life, I had never felt further from loving the questions. I hated the questions about life, and all I wanted were answers. This sparked in me a curiosity to understand whether there is anybody out there who's figured out how to love the questions of our lives, particularly the questions that can be incredibly painful, particularly in a society and in a world in which so many of us have become addicted to fast, easy answers.

This is a behavioral science book. It's deeply reported. But Rilke’s writings play a huge role in the book. You write early on that you see his response to Kappus as “a strategy to break through the paralysis of uncertainty. It's a method of truth seeking that is less interested in a final answer and more in the search for it, in what we can find along the way.”

I'm wondering if you could explain the need for this method a bit. What do we gain, as individuals and as a society, when we let go of that need for answers?

The fundamental answer is that answers and outcomes are not guaranteed. As much as we would like it to be the case, some of our deepest questions about love, loss, identity, purpose, and relationships are unanswerable, at least in any permanent way.

With those types of big questions in mind—and those are the questions that folks in the stories that I tell throughout the book are often grappling with—if you are measuring success with an answer or an outcome, you're ultimately going to be disappointed.

The definition of uncertainty that I share in the book is: a sense of doubt that stops or delays progress. When we feel uncertain, we feel stuck. We feel like we need answers to make decisions and move forward in our lives. Instead, if we put our effort into understanding our questions better, and figuring out, “Is this the right question for me to ask?” That allows us to move forward, even when we are facing uncertainty. There's this active exploration and sense of discovery and growth that can happen. It’s a way of finding a much richer life of growth and possibilities than you would if you just narrowly focused on getting one particular outcome or answer.

I was also struck by how much community and interpersonal relationships became a part of this process. This method is not about going by yourself to the cave to get comfortable with your questions. The people who seem to love the questions in the book are around people, building relationships, and discussing their questions with them. Why is community important to the method you outline in the book?

Community and connection really emerged as central components to what I define in the book as key elements of a question practice, of being able to live the questions and love the questions in a meaningful way in your life. If you take a step back and think about it, it really makes sense, given what communities evolved to do, which was to help us feel more secure in situations where we feel threatened or unsafe.

In the book, I tell the story of a man named Mateo, who, in part because of some serious childhood trauma, had started to see uncertainty and not having answers as not just a weakness, but a threat to his safety. To him, knowing all the answers and having information at his fingertips was a way to make sure that what had happened to him as a child couldn't happen again. So to stave off the discomfort of uncertainty, he would spend hours and hours searching various internet forums trying to find answers to questions that were fundamentally not answerable online, like how to be happy, and isolating himself from the world. Over time, he started to understand that he'd developed a kind of addiction to information, and that there was something deeper fueling his behavior. It was not that he necessarily wanted answers to specific questions. What he was actually craving was a connection to other people.

This has come up several times for me in motherhood. Yes, in some cases, there are questions that we can find answers to online. But in terms of the big, deep questions, ultimately, I just want someone to be with me while I ask them. I found tremendous power in finding communities of people accompanying each other in uncertainty.

Many of our readers are also either parents or caregivers. They carry not only the big questions about their own lives, but also about their children’s lives or the lives of those they care for. They face many questions about how they’re doing as caregivers and what the future holds. What advice do you have for them in navigating this uncertainty?

First of all, I would say it is hard. If you’re feeling like, “I'm facing a lot of uncertainty right now, and I'm just feeling crushed by it,” that is totally valid. This is not a toxic positivity conversation. Rilke says love is the most difficult task a human undertakes.

What can be liberating, and I know has been for me, is taking away the sense of urgency that we have to find answers. Simply have and hold these questions you have as a caregiver right now. And then wonder, can you ask them differently? Are you asking questions about possibilities for your life, about what you might want, or are they questions about closing those possibilities? Is it a question that is helping lead you back to yourself and what you want? Asking great questions can help you strengthen your relationship with yourself, rather than connect you to the expectations that others might have, or the kind of definitions that other people have for what they think your life should look like, or who you should be.

For me, I found that I was getting really anxious about this question that people kept asking me, which is, “Are you going to have a second kid?” I was feeling a sense of urgency about answering that, because I’m getting older. But what I've started to do, and I know this is not easy for busy caregivers, is try for at least just a couple of minutes at the end of the day to ask, if I am feeling anxious, is there a question behind that anxiety? And is that the question I want to be asking?

“Am I going to have another kid?” is a binary, yes-or-no question. I’ve started to ask other questions that could open the possibilities for me. I’m still playing around with this, but the question that I've been exploring is, “How will I know if I want to have a second kid?” That moves me forward rather than keeping me stuck in this place of not knowing.

You write about people who face extreme uncertainty—one man due to his mobility disability, and another due to being an undocumented immigrant. You discuss how they navigate that uncertainty, and in learning to differentiate between what they can control and what they cannot, end up feeling freer, rather than constrained.

These are very uncertain times politically, and many people face a host of structural barriers and uncertainty. What is the relationship between the kind of practice you talk about here and some of these larger forces that are creating uncertainty in our world right now?

I tell one story in the book about Miguel, an undocumented immigrant. Structurally, there are many policies, practices, and norms that are beyond his control, which can feel extremely limiting for somebody in that situation.

It is essential for all of us to push for structural changes to remove those limits. Miguel’s experience also teaches us to try to understand how these structural inequalities and the norms embedded in our culture impact the way that you see the possibilities of your own life and the very questions that you're asking.

Miguel began to realize he had been letting his life be defined by our culture, by what he was told he could do and what he could pursue, and what the optimal path was for somebody who was undocumented. He felt like he had to prove his worth by going to graduate school and immediately beginning a career, even though he did not know exactly what he wanted to do.

And he wasn't even aware of that until he met a group of other undocumented immigrants who were pursuing totally different paths from his. He met backpackers and artists who were living their lives based on their own interests, rather than the pressure to prove themselves. And this opened up in him this sense of “Wow, I don't need to let the norms and structural inequalities that I’m living in determine the questions that I'm asking and the possibilities I’m considering.”

I think both kinds of change, structural and personal, are incredibly important, and both work together. And sometimes, in the absence of having control over a particular context, this personal practice is another lever that we can pull on to try to find some additional agency.