Simple questions often come with simple answers. Detailed questions or specific questions often therefore come with a lengthy explanation and a very detailed speech. Some questions are neither short nor long, simple nor specific, some questions are to remain un-answered, and some are just questions we think about, but never really get an answer to. This is one of those questions, what makes you think about questions in the first place?
To which there inevitably reflects more questions like what is the purpose in an un-important question?, what is the definition of an important/un-important question. And overall why we as intellectual humans strive to accumulate answers to things that necessarily aren’t needed at all.
Important questions, are those that we have a reason behind, even the simplest reason, but none the less a specific reason to why you must ask something. This importance can be justified in a number of ways depending on what the answer will give you as an outcome. For example, if wanting to cook an egg , an important question would be to how long must you boil it for to ensure it is fully cooked, and to make sure it is not over cooked. The reason behind the question is therefore justified in the sense that you needed to know how long to cook it for. However, one may argue that you could just cook it and see how it goes, and therefore the question isn’t important as you could simple just use trial and error as a means of getting to the answer. However, if you get it wrong you then have wasted an egg. As trivial as this seems, the justification behind NEEDing to ask the question is more about efficiency than pure importance. It was not crucial that you find out exactly how many minutes, as you were still able to cook the egg regardless of the answer, but in the eyes of most, it would be important to know before hand to ensure you don’t waste produce.
The argument for what is important and what is just an advantage is therefore yet another factor in what we would clarify the importance of a question. If it is needed or not, and what do we therefore distinguish as ‘need’. Need is also another word similar to importance which is somewhat cloudy in its meaning, most of the time the western culture derives the word ‘need’ to be much more than what it really is. Most of the time therefore you can just replace the word with ‘want’ or ‘preferable’.
For example to cook the for mentioned egg some would argue that you NEED a fork, reality you could do it with a spoon, or even a metal pole if you don’t have any cutlery. But the argument remains what we want and need are often two very different things. No one in a developed world wants to live like a caveman and survive purely on basic ‘needs’ however a majority of the public are so consumed with greed that it is difficult to look past the discrepancies and notice that luxuries are indeed that.. just luxuries.
Which brings us back to importance, Not-important= things that you can buy in a catalogue, brand new gadgets that you obviously need because your perfectly good 2 year old one isn’t fashionable anymore. Not-important questions= the study of things that don’t matter but yet we as a nation ivest billions into it anyway. Not being specific or to point fingers I’m sure you can imagine hiring a few hundred highly qualified professors to do copious amounts of research into a specific subject matter which will never effects us, never benefit us, never give or take or have any impact on a humans life whatsoever. But yet it seems so important to invest time and money into answering such questions.
And there we have the downside to being intelligent life forms. The conscious and un-conscious mind work on different levels yet still interact. There is no logical thought or reasoning behind un important questions, but yet we still strive to answer them. An un important question therefore is a question that doesn’t have any justification at all, other than purely out of
