Why I'm Starting a Blog Called Why

Despite having made probably hundreds of hours of content for digital platforms, I have never been much of a social media publisher. Whether born of anxiety, procrastination, or judgment, my personal experience on social media has been: observe, don’t engage. The results were overall negative, as I still received the addictive stimuli with none of the positive outcomes of networking and improved communication skills. At a certain point, I realized that my specific actions and words will barely be remembered in 100 let alone 1,000 years, so why not engage, contribute.

So why, “why?” It started as an accident, as I began mentally planning a blog post that I’ll release in the future called “Why I asked dating apps to restrict my accounts.” Then I realized that (a) I do better with constraints, and having a consistent first word in the article title will help me structure my thoughts; and (b) my education both in the past as an English major, and currently as an MBA student, has centered around asking why.

When analyzing books, films, and music, the central question is why did an artist make this decision, and what were their intentions? In fiction I may also ask, why did a character do such and such? If I’m writing a critical piece, the follow-up may be, did the artist’s choice work?, but without understanding intention first that question feels shallow. Conversely, in my STEM MBA program, I’m working with data, as well as learning mental models to help frame choices, prioritization, and outcomes. While this might be considered mathematics and strategy, I think an MBA program is really only about learning how to make better decisions. Every course’s underlying purpose is to signal the what, how, and to a lesser extent when and where, to a specific purpose. Any decision must be able to be defended, justified with a clarity that can only be explained by asking why. Of course, it need not always be explicit, but even for automated responses (e.g. turning the steering wheel slightly to change lanes—a Kahneman System 1 action), if we consider them critically, we can explain the reason why they occurred.

It’s almost become cliche—a TED Talk truism: Ask “why?” A framework to find your purpose. Well, the reason I have based my blog around this word is because it’s flexible yet pervasive. Any situation one encounters must be rooted in an underlying reason, and that reason will have its own underlying reason, and so forth.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I enjoy writing, and rarely do it anymore except for private journaling. I’d like to push myself out of my comfort zone, so I will release a weekly post about things that intertwine life with professional experiences. I’ll use it to talk about personal decisions I make, design choices I notice in the world, things I learn, books I read, and new (often silly) ideas. I don’t think much in life is sacred, yet it’s easy to live where everything internal feels prized and fragile.