An Ode to The Frequently Unanswered Question

As a copywriter I frequently write FAQ pages for websites. FAQs, as you may know, are frequently asked questions that provide a quick and easy way for people to find their way to the product, service, or subject matter a website is about. It’s also a great way for a website to be noticed by the search engines as you can nicely stuff these pages with keywords and definitions.

As I was recently writing one, it dawned on me that there are are absolutely no FUQ- pages, i.e. pages for frequently unanswered questions. At first glance this may seem logical. Any page devoted to questions that frequently occur will typically attempt to answer them. And as the answering gets underway, the unanswered nature of these questions is undone. Any remaining unanswered questions are probably not worth the attention.

And that’s where things go wrong because a lot of unanswered questions are never answered because they are unanswerable. On the face of it, it seems normal that there are only FAQ-pages but when you dig deeper you wonder where the FUQ-pages are. Sure as hell, the FUQs are, if not more numerous, definitely more weighty than the FAQs.

The Paradox Of The Unanswerable Question

So there is a deeper story here. At a meta-level, there’s a host of questions that go unanswered. In fact, most if not all questions that actually truly matter, go unanswered. What is the meaning of life? Where do we go from here? Is there life after death? Does God exist? What is the best whiskey in the world? All of these are deeply existential questions for which no answer is available.

As it happens, all across the globe these unanswerable questions are subjected to a lot of FAQ-attempts. They are FAQ-ed over, if you will. In their search for closure and certainty, the open-ended nature of these questions needs to be erased. “Come here,” many people say, “we will only allow you to exist if you can be answered.” And answered they are. We exist for the sole purpose of glorifying God. After this life, you either to go heaven or hell. God does absolutely not exist. And bourbon.

The odd thing is this. The unanswerable question is a strange bird. On the one hand, it resists answering. It refuses to provide closure. You cannot answer it with something that ends with a period. Even less an exclamation mark. And yet, leaving it hanging in midair, it will come tumbling down and crashes right in your face. This is a paradox. The unanswerable question cannot be answered but cannot remain without a response.

To remain within the copywriting and content marketing metaphor, the attempt to turn the FUQs into FAQs is extremely damaging for those who do so and even more so for those who buy into it. But to ignore the FUQs such that there are only web pages devoted to FAQs and none to FUQs will in the end destroy the whole point of information gathering that takes place on the interwebs.

Embracing the Great Wide Open

I suppose the way to deal with the paradox is to embrace both the FUQs as questions and accept their unanswerability. The idea is to get to work with them without trying to find closure on them. Existentially this means to start engaging these questions as a living being, to live out of these questions, and live in the direction of an answer in the great wide open.



FUQ-pages will look rather different than FAQ-pages. The latter consist of concise questions with short definitions or explanations for an answer. The FUQs will more be like collaborative projects where people plugin with a non-linear chat-like style in a social media-like environment to share their contribution to the questions.

The FAQs are not us. They are tools to work with. Tools to become good at living into the FUQs. The FUQs is what we really are. Struggling along in our unknowing we FUQ around without knowing what life is all about. And yet it is there that we find our greatness of being as we share our lives with one another.

I wish we would pay more attention to this. I’m sure that if we set ourselves to the task, almost any whiskey will do.

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