Wrong Questions
Essays examining how misframed questions quietly distort understanding.
About this series
This series focuses on widely accepted questions that feel reasonable but subtly misrepresent the problem they are meant to address. Each essay demonstrates how certain questions constrain thought before answers are even considered. Rather than offering solutions, the work replaces distorted questions with better-formed ones, allowing understanding to reorganize without force. The emphasis is on cognitive structure, not opinion or debate.
Why Do We Talk So Much About Emotional Intelligence — and See So Little of It?
Emotional intelligence is widely discussed yet rarely embodied. This essay argues that EI has been reduced to emotional management rather than integration, leaving people articulate but brittle. By reframing emotional intelligence as containment, it examines how modern environments block emotional metabolism and why true emotional maturity depends on conditions, not skills.
Are We Actually Understanding More — or Just Explaining Faster?
In an age of endless information, explanation can feel like understanding. This essay challenges that assumption, showing how fluency and speed create a mirage of expertise while bypassing integration. It traces how abstraction turns knowledge portable but thin, and why real understanding requires contact, presence, and psychological maturity rather than performance.
Are We Actually Freer — or Just Given More Choices?
Why does greater freedom so often feel overwhelming rather than empowering? This essay examines how modern culture confuses freedom with choice, mistaking option abundance for agency. By exposing the psychological cost of constant self-curation and decision overload, it reframes freedom as orientation rather than excess—revealing why more choices can quietly undermine autonomy instead of expanding it.
Are We Actually Smarter — or Just Later?
Are we actually more intelligent than those who came before us—or are we confusing historical timing with cognitive superiority? This essay examines how modern culture mistakes inherited infrastructure for individual insight, revealing why intelligence has diversified across environments rather than progressed in a straight line. The question itself, not the answer, turns out to be the error.