What is the hardest question in life?
Executive summary
The contest for "the hardest question in life" collapses into two competing families: foundational metaphysical queries—why is there something rather than nothing, what is reality, how did consciousness arise—and the existential, practical question of what one ought to do with the single life one has; scholars and popular lists advance both sets, and philosophers differ on which is prior [1] [2] [3]. Sources that catalogue "big" or "unsolved" philosophical problems show persistent disagreement rather than consensus, so the answer lies less in naming a single question than in recognizing that the hardest question is the meta-question about what counts as a reasoned, answerable question at all [4] [5].
1. The metaphysical heavyweight: why is there something rather than nothing
Several writers and philosophers treat the question "why is there something rather than nothing" as the most basic and therefore hardest inquiry, because it underpins any further question about God, meaning, or morality and forces inquiry into existence itself; Tom Harper and related summaries explicitly call this the most basic philosophical question [1]. This question resists scientific reduction and often migrates into cosmology and theology, making it simultaneously foundational in philosophy and stubbornly open-ended in the sources surveyed [1] [6].
2. Consciousness, qualia and the explanatory gap: the mind that asks
A recurring entry on lists of intractable problems is consciousness—how subjective experience arises from physical processes—and articles about "hardest unsolved problems" and popular roundups place qualia and the hard problem of consciousness among top contenders because the phenomenon seems resistant to current scientific explanation [2] [6]. This becomes a meta‑problem: the very faculty that frames "the hardest question" (the mind) is itself the object of the hardest question, producing a reflexive difficulty noted across the sources [2] [5].
3. The moral and practical rival: what ought I do with my life
Many popular guides and compilations of philosophical questions emphasize meaning, ethics, and life‑direction—what counts as a good life, how to choose between values, and what responsibilities bind us—as fundamentally hard and deeply consequential [7] [8] [3]. Unlike cosmic metaphysics, these questions wear immediate moral and psychological weight: they are the hardest to live with because their answers shape action, identity and social relations, a recurring theme in listicles and educational resources that aim to provoke everyday reflection [7] [8].
4. The epistemic and methodological wrinkle: what makes a question answerable
Several sources point out a less glamorous but crucial difficulty: some philosophical problems persist because we lack criteria for what counts as a legitimate answer—problems of skepticism, the is‑ought gap, and disputes about philosophical progress make it hard to adjudicate solutions [2] [9] [10]. Gizmodo and other thinkers emphasize that some questions may be "beyond limits of comprehension" or misframed, which shifts emphasis from the content of any single question to the meta‑question of how to formulate answerable questions [6] [9].
5. A synthesis: the hardest question is often the one that most reshapes inquiry
The surveyed reporting suggests that different traditions privilege different winners—cosmologists and metaphysicians favor "why is there something"; cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind point to consciousness; ethicists and self‑help lists stress meaning and choice—but a common thread is the meta‑level challenge: knowing which question to ask and how to adjudicate answers is itself the deepest difficulty [1] [5] [10]. That meta‑question—what questions are legitimate, and which methods can settle them—functions as the practical bottleneck across the sources, explaining why lists of "hardest questions" repeatedly return to issues about reality, mind, and value without converging on final answers [4] [2].