When you were five, your father told you the sun rises every day, and you asked, “Why?”.

He said it was because the Earth is spinning, and you asked, “Why?”. He ventured a guess about electromagnetic fields, and you asked, “Why?”. Exasperated, he threw his arms up in the air saying, “I don’t know, that’s just the way it is.”

When you were fifteen, you couldn’t care less why the sun rises and wished your father would just leave you alone.

As we grow up, we stop asking The Most Important Question. Why? Because the most uncomfortable feeling in the world is to confront evidence disproving what you believe. If you ask, you risk hearing a “wrong” answer. If that happens, it’s easier to change the evidence than your belief, which happens to be the exact opposite of how computers and science work.

For example, a sexist man interviews for a job but loses the position to a woman. Why? Because she happens to be more capable. This is a painful belief for the man, incompatible with his worldview, so he avoids the thorn by amending the evidence instead. “She got the job because she flirted with the hiring manager.” Crisis averted. The man’s career outlook is bleak because he never learns new skills to raise his value, but his ego is unharmed because he imagined a different reality instead of asking that difficult Why.

Why do we send our kids to college? Why do we work five days a week and not four or six? Why do we trust Google and Facebook with our personal lives? Maybe we think we know the answers to these questions, but what if we’re wrong? Maybe we’re right and the answers won’t change anything, but then there’s no harm in asking. Maybe these questions will lead us to more Whys, and hopefully to some Why Nots.