“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.” — Voltaire

In Season 3 of “The White Lotus,” the Ratliffs, a wealthy family from North Carolina on vacation at the luxury White Lotus hotel in Thailand, are on different levels of spiritual evolution. The daughter Piper is questioning the values of her outwardly successful family while her mother Victoria proclaims that if they lost everything, “I don’t know if I’d want to live. I just don’t think at this age I’m meant to live an uncomfortable life. I don’t have the will… I just don’t have it in me. I don’t think I ever did.”

The mother is in a state of arrested development, while the daughter is asking the big questions (even if — spoiler alert! — she, too, ends up not being able to give up the trappings of worldly success in the end). It's one of those moments when pop culture taps into something deeper that’s going on. What’s supposed to be the best life can offer — exotic vacations, luxury hotels, and lots of money — curdles into misery. To drive home the point, this misery happens as the show’s characters experience the emptiness and superficial pampering of the wellness movement — a parade of massages and digital detoxes that only serve to show how profoundly unwell everyone is.

In The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, Christopher Booker writes about our fundamental need to experience the world and ourselves through stories. In the best of stories, the outward progression of the protagonists tracks their inner development and self-realization. But in “The White Lotus,” the mother exemplifies a protagonist disconnected from any inner growth and development, while the daughter is asking life’s big questions.

Indeed, it’s amazing how many otherwise incredibly smart and curious people are strangely incurious about the most important question of all: Why are we here? Maybe we’ll never get a definitive answer, but, as Eugene Ionesco wrote, “It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.” As Booker puts it, we’re devoting “untold physical and mental resources to reaching out into the furthest recesses of the galaxy, or to delving into the most delicate mysteries of the atom ­ in an attempt, as we like to think, to plumb every last secret of the universe.” But we’re ignoring life’s biggest, most important mystery: Why are we here?

As Booker shows, the process of “gradually developing toward that state of self-realization” is central to all seven plots of literature: Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy and Rebirth. In each, the outward journey of the hero is simply a proxy for something much more important: the inner journey.

That’s a central theme not just of the seven basic plots, but of every ancient spiritual and religious tradition. All forms of powerful stories, as well as contemplative and spiritual practices, like poetry, hymns, and connecting with nature and art are about helping us get to our essence, which is a never-ending process. But along the way, we lost the plot. In the eighteenth century, the scientific revolution was taking off, giving us unprecedented insight into and control over the natural world. Age-old spiritual questions were superseded by a wave of new scientific answers. Blaise Pascal championed empirical science, but also saw the limits on the questions that the scientific method could answer. For Pascal, things like entertainment, busyness, social ambition and unbridled faith in scientific progress were simply divertissements, or distractions, to avoid exploring our inner selves. As he famously put it, “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

This disconnect from life’s big questions was also reflected in literature. In 1830, Stendhal published his novel The Red and the Black. Ostensibly a rags to riches narrative, the novel’s two-dimensional hero, Julien Sorel, climbs upward in French society, and then in the end tragically loses everything. What was different here was that in both Sorel’s rise and fall there’s no inner journey or transformation at all.

The novel was emblematic of a fundamental shift in countless modern stories that, as Booker puts it, “change the psychological ‘centre of gravity’ from which they have been told.” Our stories, like ourselves, became detached from life’s big questions and our primary purpose. 

As heroes of our own stories, our outward progression can be — to borrow from another hit show of the moment — severed from our inward progression. And part of that unconscious uncoupling is our disconnection with the biggest questions of life. Carl Jung wrote that among his patients over 35, “every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook.”

Which is not to say our answers to the big questions of life, or the manner in which we ask them, need to be based around organized religion. That’s just one way to answer our instinct for spiritual growth. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that though Americans are moving away from organized religion, nearly three-quarters consider themselves spiritual, 86% believe people have a soul or spirit, 83% believe in a God or a universal spirit, and 79% believe in something beyond the natural world.

When we’re only playing in the shallows, we’re neglecting the rewards that only come from exploring the depths. And of course, exploring is inherently about asking questions and venturing into the unknown — we can’t explore places we already know. And yet that’s never been harder, partly because we’re swimming in technology. In his 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr explores how the internet degrades our capacity to go deep. “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words,” he writes. “Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” In the end, Carr says, “we become, neurologically, what we think.” And spiritually, as well.

As the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh put it, “It's never been easier to run away from ourselves.” And with technology, we don’t even have to run to be enveloped in distractions that disconnect us from ourselves. 

Paradoxically, there’s now a new technology that could prove to be a defense against previous forms of technology – especially social media – designed to consume our attention. AI has the potential to help us plumb the inner depths and ask the big questions.

Not because it can readily supply easy answers. When I asked ChatGPT’s Deep Research “why are we here?” I got a long reply citing theories from various philosophical traditions, including existentialism, nihilism, absurdism, and Eastern and Western religions. What was missing was the spiritual heart of the question. When it came to religious and spiritual traditions, the focus was on following the external rules and rituals. ChatGPT then transitioned to the idea of meaning, saying that the question “why are we here?” has a “personal significance in psychology and day-to-day human experience.” When we’re “fully engaged in living,” it said, “the question of life’s meaning often ‘evaporates,’ replaced by a sense of purpose naturally from involvement in life.”

But purpose doesn’t make the big questions evaporate. We can find meaning in our daily rituals, in our families, in our work. And when we do, that’s great. But as we see in “The White Lotus,” and in countless other stories all around us, seeking exclusive meaning in work or in things outside ourselves doesn’t suffice.

AI does hold spiritual promise in other ways. In his book Digital Dharma: How AI Can Elevate Spiritual Intelligence and Personal Well-Being, Deepak Chopra shows how AI can serve as a guide to inner explorations, acting as a coach and a confidante. But much of the value we get out of it depends on the prompt (once again, it’s all about asking the right questions). “The art is in the prompt.” Chopra told me. “AI is basically a huge search engine which combines every language, history, narrative, and philosophy. But spirituality is not a system of thought. Spirituality is how to go beyond all systems of thought. So AI becomes a map.” Put another way, it’s less of a guidebook about the destination than a guide suggesting different routes to explore and reminding us to stay focused on the journey.

Our natural instinct to explore is often talked about in terms of venturing outward to the cosmos. “Exploration is in our nature,” declared Carl Sagan. “We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still.” Or, as one of those wanderers, Buzz Aldrin, put it: “Exploration is wired into our brains. If we can see the horizon, we want to know what’s beyond.” And we’ve spent billions of dollars exploring only the tiniest fraction of outer space. Yes, our need to explore is hard-wired, but we’re just as wired to explore inner space.

As Albert Einstein put it, “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” In fact, the Curiosity rover, launched in 2011, is still exploring Mars. In congratulating the NASA Team on its success, President Obama said that “what makes us best as a species is this curiosity we have — this yearning to discover and know more and push the boundaries of knowledge.”

But those boundaries are also in the limitless frontier we all have within us. The point is to reconnect our outward stories and our progression through our daily lives and struggles with our inner progress and transformation. “Whatever the power that created the universe,” writes Christopher Booker, “what more extraordinary act of the imagination could there be than that it should create a tiny part of that mater­ial universe which took on its own separate existence” that could “step outside its unconscious obedience to instinct” and “speculate as to where it had come from and why it had been created.” That’s the true hero’s journey. And it starts with a question: Why are we here? When we ask it, and go deeper and deeper in search of the answers, our lives are immeasurably enriched.