Even in daily life, raising strategic questions can feel tiresome and odd. To ask ‘what’s the point of doing this?’ is easy to mistake for a piece of provocative negativity. If we challenge our acquaintances with any degree of seriousness with questions such as: ‘What is a good holiday?’, ‘What is a relationship for?’, ‘What is a satisfying conversation?’ or ‘Why do we want money?’, we risk coming across as absurd and pretentious – as though such large questions were by definition unanswerable.
