A Rhetorical Question

"Life isn't about the destination, it's about the journey"

Some people live by this, and others don't, but it got me thinking about the idea of closure, or the belief that a question needs an answer, that a question cannot exist without one.

Some questions we know don't expect an answer, as in a rhetorical question.  These are questions that are asked with no expectation of an answer to be given, but is that because one does not exist or because the person who poses the question believes it's unfathomable for an individual to actually be able to find an answer?

I've struggled with this concept in my life as I am rather socially awkward and it's not that easy for me to tell when someone actually wants an answer to their question or not - to the point where on social media and in group settings if a question is not directed at me personally, even if I do know the answer, I'm reluctant to give it.  I feel this way because when you are mistaken, and answer a question someone intended to be rhetorical, the reaction is usually one of judgement.

Here's the thing though, is it actually possible to ask a truly rhetorical question?  I don't mean a question that is nonsensical, or deliberately designed to have no possible answer; instead I mean a question that could have an answer, but that answer could never reasonably be expected to be found, to the point where the person asking it doesn't actually want to know the answer?

It's easy to come up with questions that have been long unanswered, but almost all of those that I can think of, including the cliché "What is the meaning of life?" question, are all questions that people would actually want to know the answer to, if you found it.  It's also easy to create nonsensical questions like the infamous "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" from Alice Adventures in Wonderland - which curious enough during research for this post I found out there was originally an intended answer to that question.  The trouble with these questions is unless the creator at the time of creation also creates a canonical answer to the question, you can't verify whether you found the right one therefore making it an impossible question, not a rhetorical one.

So that brings us back to the original concept, what question do you think no-one can or will ever know the answer to, for which you don't actually want to know the answer?

The closest I can come to this is the question "What is the value of Pi?" as it is a question that an answer could exist for, but no-one is ever likely to find it as Pi is an irrational number and attempts to calculate it seemingly run to infinite decimal places so a precise value can not be found - the trouble with this as a rhetorical question is that it doesn't meet the criteria of being a question nobody would actually be interested in the answer to, as many people have dedicated their careers to researching it.