The Stone of Interrogation

Published on September 17, 2025 By Mrityu Darpan

At ten years old, a simple diagram of the solar system shattered my reality.

In a classroom filled with the familiar drone of a teacher's voice, a poster showed a big yellow circle with colorful planets orbiting it. The teacher explained that the third one — a fragile-looking blue marble — was where our school stood, where we played in the prayer ground, where our entire world existed. The knowledge felt like a revelation. There were other, bigger circles out there, some with magnificent rings, and I had never even seen them. I knew, with every fiber of my being, that I had to.

Full of this newfound purpose, I ran to my older cousin. "How can we go see those other circles?" I asked, buzzing with excitement.

Her answer was flat and final. "We can't."

"Why?"

She wasn't sure why, but she was certain. It wasn't possible. Nobody goes to see them with their own eyes. Just like that, my desire to witness the revelation was shattered. The spark of adventure in my eyes was extinguished, replaced by what I can only describe as the cold, heavy stone of interrogation.

This wasn't just curiosity; it was a deep agitation with the idea that the worlds I was being taught about were fundamentally beyond my reach. The questions began to rain down.

Are we just floating? What’s beyond the last planet? Where does it all end?

My cousin's final answer offered no comfort. "The universe just keeps going. Nobody knows where it ends, or if it even has an end."

I felt a profound hopelessness. My small, finite self in a seemingly infinite and unknowable existence. It felt meaningless. But soon, puberty hit, and for a while, I had other problems to deal with.

For the next decade, my path was set. School, college, job. The mission was simple: do what's required of you to the best of your ability. And I did. I even found a new kind of joy in it, excelling in my studies. The new rules, theorems, and formulae felt like self-contained worlds, neatly defined and waiting to be explored. There was little time to ponder the bigger questions of existence.

Until, suddenly, there was.

The universe forced the questions back upon me in the most brutal way possible: through the deaths of loved ones. I was confronted again by that same feeling of unknowability I'd felt as a child staring at that solar system chart. Surrounded by meaninglessness — the impenetrable void of space on one side, and the finality of death on the other — I began to doubt everything. My own senses, my perception of reality, the very foundation of my existence.

I realized I knew nothing. The truth had never been in my sight.

So, I went back to the worlds of science, but this time with a singular purpose: to look for the truth. To understand why existence felt so unknowable, why there was death, and what meaning, if any, it all held.

Studying with a reason changed everything. For the first 21 years of my life, I excelled at academics without a deeper 'why'. But when I joined a prestigious firm, D.E. Shaw & Co., simply excelling wasn't enough. The need for a reason, a purpose, became urgent. When I started applying this need not just to my work, but to my life and our very existence, I began to see the flaws in our collective understanding.

Science wasn't the monolithic pillar of certainty I had imagined. The elegant structures of mathematics felt hollow without a foundational purpose. I realized the deepest flaw of our modern world, from science to the economy, was the absence of a proper reason — the "Why."

This realization shifted my entire perspective. My question was no longer, "What's beyond the last planet?"

It became, "Why is there a planet in the first place?"

This is the question that fuels this blog. I believe that if we can answer why there is a universe, then in principle, we can understand everything that follows: why there is a sun, why there are planets, why we are here, and why the loss of our loved ones is not just a cruel rule of nature, but part of a deeper meaning.

It is my personal, driving conviction that the answer to "Why?" can lead us to the ultimate truth of existence. It can unify science and spirituality, psychology and biology, consciousness and physics — all under a single, first principle.

This is my gut feeling, and I am following it. This blog is my journey to find that first principle, a truth I believe can usher humanity into a new era — one where we are not helpless victims of misery, because we will finally understand why it exists. And then, we can begin to fix it.

What questions about existence have shaped your own journey? Share your thoughts in the comments below.