Question everything

Douglas Coupland’s “Girlfriend in a Coma” is a book that fundamentally shaped my world view. l read it back in 1998 and its core message "to question everything” was so powerful it still drives me to this day to challenge the status quo and ask how we can do better.

Almost 30 years later I believe it’s message is more relevant than ever.

““…back in the old world, didn’t you feel as if the only way you could fully, truly change yourself in the powerful way you yearned for was to die and then start again from scratch? Didn’t you feel as if all of the symbols and ideas fed to you since birth has become worn out like old shoes? Didn’t you ache for change but you didn’t know how to achieve it?….

…in your new lives you’ll have to live entirely for that one sensation - that of imminent truth. And you’re going to have to holler for it, steal for it, beg for it -and you’re never going to stop asking questions.

“Every day for the rest of your lives, all of your living moments are to be spent making others aware of this need - the need to probe and drill and examine and locate the words that take us to beyond ourselves.

Ask questions, no screech questions out loud - while kneeling in front of the electric doors at Safeway, demanding other citizens ask questions along with you - while chewing up old textbooks and spitting the words onto downtown sidewalks - outside the Planet Hollywood, outside the stock exchange and outside the Gap.

“Grind questions onto the glass on photocopiers. Scrape challenges onto old auto parts and throw them off of bridges so that future people digging in the mud will question the world, too. Carve eyeballs into tire treads and onto shoe leathers so that your every trail speaks of thinking and questioning and awareness. Design molecules that crystallise into question marks. Make bar-codes print out fables, not prices. You can’t even throw away a piece of litter unless it has a questions stamped on it - a demand for people to reach a finer place.”

“Ask whatever challenges dead and thoughtless beliefs.””