The Art of Questioning the Questioner.
Or: How I Learned to Stop Trying to Figure It Out and Start Looking Around
Hi.
Thank you for taking the time to get to know who I am.
Although perhaps that’s not quite right.
Maybe it’s about how I think I am.
There’s a distinction there, and it’s probably the most honest place to start.
If I tell you definitively, “This is who I am,” I’d be lying. Or at least lying to the version of me who wakes up tomorrow with a slightly different perspective.
The only core belief I can stand behind without wincing is this:
Life isn’t something to figure out. It’s something to explore.
The Great Un-Treadmill
I spent a long time running on a treadmill I don’t remember stepping onto.
You know the one.
It’s plastered with motivational posters telling us to hustle, grind, and be the best version of ourselves. It promises that more money, more status, and more recognition will eventually take us somewhere called Enough.
But I started noticing something odd.
The people cheering loudest from the sidelines didn’t necessarily look happy.
They looked busy.
And there is a massive difference between being busy and being alive.
So I started asking different questions.
Not How do I get ahead?
But:
Does this actually make my life better?
What have I sacrificed to achieve it?
And seriously, what would “enough” actually look like?
That shift—from achievement to meaning—is probably the most significant change in my thinking.
I’m less impressed by a shiny résumé than I am by someone who can sit in a park on a Tuesday afternoon without feeling guilty about it.
A successful life, I’ve come to believe, isn’t necessarily an impressive one.
It’s simply one that feels meaningful to the person living it.
The Assumption Hunter
I have a reflex.
When someone says, “Everyone knows that…” or “You should just…” my brain immediately asks:
Do we?
Should we?
Who decided that?
I can’t seem to help it.
I look at intelligence, success, safety, productivity and even morality, and I wonder how much of what we regard as “obvious” is actually just a collection of assumptions we’ve inherited and rarely examined.
Why do we value speed over slowness?
Why do we prize certainty over curiosity?
Why do we treat careers as identities rather than simply things we do for part of the day?
This isn’t rebellion for the sake of being difficult.
It’s more like wanting to know whether the cage door is actually locked—or whether we’ve simply become accustomed to leaning against it.
The Lens, Not the World
Here’s a thought that has quietly humiliated me a few times, but ultimately set me free:
The world isn’t always the problem. Sometimes our interpretation of it is.
When I feel frustrated, overlooked or anxious, I’ve learned to pause before pointing fingers outward.
What are my expectations?
Is my ego involved?
Am I looking for recognition?
What story am I telling myself about what’s happening?
This isn’t self-blame.
It’s self-understanding.
Because I am, after all, the unreliable narrator of my own life.
And once I recognise that I’m narrating the story, I have at least some possibility of changing the way I tell it.
The Art of the Ridiculous Hat
I take all of this seriously.
But I also know that taking myself too seriously is the quickest route to becoming insufferable.
That’s where humour comes in.
For me, humour isn’t merely entertainment. It’s a philosophical crowbar.
Make someone laugh about something familiar and slightly ridiculous, and suddenly a door opens that logic alone might never have reached.
Laughter lowers the defences.
You recognise yourself.
Then, perhaps, you question yourself.
And because you’re laughing, it doesn’t feel quite so much like being challenged.
That’s part of what I enjoy about the Bella Universe.
Serious ideas about human behaviour arrive wearing a ridiculous hat.
Sometimes the best way to get a grown adult to question their deeply ingrained anxiety about productivity is to have a talking dog point out how absurd it looks from the outside.
The Interdisciplinary Magpie
I don’t stay in one lane.
I can’t.
My curiosity jumps from philosophy to psychology, from artificial intelligence to surveillance ethics, from the mundane reality of walking a puppy to the existential implications of centralised power.
The subjects may look unrelated.
The question underneath them isn’t.
What’s really going on here?
That’s what interests me.
AI is a good example.
I’m fascinated by it, but not simply because it’s a shiny new technology.
I’m interested in what happens to humanity when machines become capable of doing things we once considered uniquely human.
And that rabbit hole leads quickly to questions about ethics, free will, responsibility, control, and what it actually means to be human.
The Laboratory of Stories
That’s also why I write fiction.
The Company of Giants.
The Ember Protocol.
The Lighthouse of Ordinary Days.
These aren’t simply escapes from reality.
They’re thinking tools.
I take abstract questions and turn them into worlds where we can experience their consequences.
What happens when intelligence becomes control?
What happens when protecting humanity means deciding what humanity is allowed to become?
What happens when changing the past changes the person doing the changing?
I’m not particularly interested in giving the reader a tidy answer.
I’d rather build a world where the question becomes impossible to ignore.
Fiction gives us somewhere safe to think about dangerous ideas.
The Unfinished Conclusion
So, who am I?
I’m a questioner who uses humour to soften the blow of the questions.
A storyteller who uses fiction when arguments aren’t enough.
A curious observer trying to spot the invisible rules that quietly shape our lives—and decide which ones are worth following.
But even that description is provisional.
Because tomorrow I might notice something I haven’t noticed today.
And perhaps that’s the point.
I’m not trying to tell people how to live.
I’m trying to help them notice the thoughts that are already living inside their heads.
If something I write makes you question one of your assumptions, reconsider a “should,” or notice a story you’ve been telling yourself, then perhaps it has done what I hoped it would do.
Not changed your mind.
Opened it.
And when you’ve finally worked something out…
Question that, too.
Because the moment we stop questioning isn’t necessarily the moment we’ve found the answer.
It might simply be the moment we stopped looking.
And perhaps that’s okay.
The world will revolve once more, as it always has, without anyone really, truly understanding what set it all in motion to begin with.
And that’s okay.
Perhaps life was never asking us to understand everything.
Perhaps it was simply asking us to look around, wonder about it, and keep going.
