What is one thing you can’t live without?
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Ask people what they cannot live without, and the answers come quickly: food, water, shelter, the people they love. My answer is not on that list. Strictly speaking, I could survive without it. Many people do.
It is the desire to keep learning. More precisely, it is the question I have not yet answered.
That may seem a strange thing to depend on: something I do not yet possess. Yet I have come to believe that a mind is kept alive less by what it knows than by what it still wants to know.
1. A book I thought I knew
For me, learning has never been confined to classrooms. A conversation can introduce an unfamiliar perspective, and even a mistake can become a valuable teacher if we are willing to learn from it. But the clearest lesson came from a book.
When I was a postgraduate student of economics, the book I loved most was Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Smith is usually remembered as the champion of self-interest. Yet seventeen years earlier he had published The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which opens by observing that however selfish a person may be, something in human nature makes us care about the fortunes of others. Read side by side, the two books say more than either says alone. A book I have loved for decades still had something to teach me, because I had not stopped asking it questions.
2. Experience is not the same as wisdom
I believe the greatest danger is not growing old but becoming intellectually stagnant. Age may bring experience, but experience alone does not guarantee wisdom. Left unexamined, it hardens into certainty.
Tamil grammarians conceded this about language itself. The Nannool [1], composed around the turn of the thirteenth century by the Jain scholar Pavanandi, accepts that old usages fall away and new ones come in. It declares this no fault: it is simply the way of time. If a grammar can concede that much, so can a mind. Letting an old certainty give way to a better understanding is not a betrayal of experience. It is what experience is for.
3. Every tradition begins with wanting
Many traditions begin not with knowledge but with the desire for it. The Brahma Sutra, a foundational text of Vedanta, opens with a single line: athato brahma jijnasa, “now, therefore, the desire to know Brahman” [2]. The word jijnasa does not mean knowledge. It means the wish to know. In the Qur’an, the Prophet is taught a prayer that asks not for completion but for more: “My Lord, increase me in knowledge” (Surah Ta-Ha 20:114).
Neither text treats the unanswered question as a failure. One places the wanting at the very beginning; the other turns it into a prayer. The more we discover, the more clearly we see how much remains unknown, and that is exactly what keeps the search fresh.
4. Must every question stay open?
Here I must argue against myself. A life made only of open questions would be a life without an anchor. Some things I hold firmly: my faith, my values, the people I love. I do not reopen them each morning, and I would be wary of anyone who did. Curiosity that refuses every conviction is not openness. It is drift.
The difference lies in the kind of question we keep. Anselm of Canterbury, the eleventh-century theologian, described his work as faith seeking understanding [3]. The question I cannot live without is rarely whether to keep what I hold. It is how to understand it more deeply. Conviction gives a question its roots; the question keeps the conviction alive.
5. The appetite has to be fed
Curiosity does not survive on good intentions alone. A few habits help at any age. Keep a list of questions, not only answers, and let some of them stay open for a while before asking a search engine or an AI to close them. Return to a book you think you know and ask it something new. Learn something from a person much younger than you, in a field they understand better. And once a year, take an opinion you have held for a long time, about people, work or the world, and ask honestly what would change your mind.
Age will take its share of things in time. I would rather it never took my questions.
I want to keep reading, writing, observing and questioning, and to learn from people, from nature, from technology and from the wisdom handed down through generations. I want each new day to show me something I did not understand yesterday. I may not discover everything, answer every question or master every subject. But I hope never to lose the enthusiasm to explore what I do not yet know.
So the one thing I cannot live without is, in the end, something I do not yet possess: the next question. I hope I never run out of them.
A question for you
What is the one thing you cannot imagine living without? Is it something you already have, or something you are still reaching for? Share your answer in the comments. It may help another reader see their own life a little differently.
Notes
[1] The Nannool (“the good book”) is a Tamil grammar composed between about 1178 and 1216 by Pavanandi Munivar, a Jain scholar. It is regarded as the most important Tamil grammar after the Tolkappiyam. The line paraphrased here, “Pazhaiyana kazhithalum puthiyana puguthalum vazhuvala kaala vagaiyinaane”, comes from its section on words (Sollathikaram). It is still quoted in Tamil Nadu at Bhogi, the festival on which old things are cleared away to make room for the new.
[2] The Brahma Sutra, traditionally attributed to Badarayana, is a foundational text of the Vedanta schools of Indian philosophy. Jijnasa is a Sanskrit desiderative form meaning, literally, “the desire to know”.
[3] Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) gave his Proslogion the original title Fides quaerens intellectum, “faith seeking understanding”.
John Britto Kurusumuthu
Rise & Inspire · riseandinspire.co.in
In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt, 8 November 2026: What is one thing you can’t live without?
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