Inside The Machine: Arguing About Answers to the Wrong Questions
A Field Guide to the Answers that Keep the Masses Compliant in Their Own Destruction
Alright. The answer to the ultimate question: life, the universe, everything…is 42..I checked it thoroughly. It would have been simpler, of course, to have known what the actual question was….That's not a question. Only when you know what the actual question will you know what the answer means. —paraphrased from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Asking the Wrong Questions: A Hitchhiker’s Guide Follow-Up
In my last essay, I wrote about Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and how the machine—the trauma loop itself—keeps us trapped chasing answers. But it felt unfinished. Because the real danger isn’t just bad answers. It’s bad questions.
Scripture, Frozen and Packaged
I’ve often said that the Bible was our blueprint for this. Not because it’s perfect, but because it was meant to be lived stories recorded in real time. Human beings, trying to make sense of suffering, survival, and meaning.
But instead of adding to it, we froze it. We made it scripture. Untouchable.
Now all ancient books read like scripture. And all modern books—even when they try to resist—are marketed the same way: themed, packaged, sold. TED Talks. Docuseries. Podcasts. True crime breakdowns. Bestsellers. They all become products.
Because echo chambers are profitable. Extraction is profitable. But wisdom is not.
The ancients knew it, but we have forgotten.
Wisdom isn’t found in the packaging. It isn’t found in the branding.
Wisdom is found in the collective.
The Box, the Train, the House, the Story
I’ve watched people argue over answers and definitions to terminology my whole life. But the questions being asked? The terminology? They’re the wrong ones.
Everyone is still thinking inside the box. Rearranging it. Decorating it. Even fighting to escape it. But no one asks: Where did the box come from? Who built it, and why do we keep climbing back inside?
We’re passengers on a runaway train. Some fight over seats. Others argue about the view out the window. But hardly anyone asks: Why is the train moving so fast? Who laid the tracks? And what would it take to slow it down—or stop it altogether?
We keep patching cracks in the walls, rearranging the furniture, repainting the trim. But no one asks if the foundation itself is rotting. If the beams were cut wrong from the start. If maybe this house was never safe to live in.
We argue over the latest chapter, the spin of a single paragraph. But the real question is: Who wrote the book? What if the ending was rigged from the beginning? What if the story itself was designed to keep us small, divided, distracted?
Living Inside the Wrong Questions
And I know what it feels like to live inside those wrong questions.
When I was sick, the question was never why do so many women suffer silently with autoimmune disease? It was: why can’t you just push through? Why can’t you work harder?
When I was poor, the question was never why is survival tied to a paycheck, or to whether my body can keep up with a system built to grind me down? It was: why didn’t you manage your money better? Why don’t you take another shift?
When I was in recovery, the question was never what trauma drove me into the arms of addiction? What healing could make a different path possible? It was: why did you make bad choices? Why couldn’t you control yourself?
Always the wrong questions. Always questions that point the blame back at me—or at people like me—while the machine itself hums on, unexamined, unquestioned.
Stories as Mirrors, Not Formulas
And that’s the part that grates the most: everyone is so quick to package their survival story as a formula. This is how I did it, so you can do it too. As if the path is universal. As if grit and willpower were the only variables.
But that erases the machine. The harm. The trauma-loop that swallows us whole.
In June, I wrote about this in The Healing Power of Stories:
“Stories let us see what others have endured, how they adapted, and what they carried forward. But stories are not formulas. They are not proof that if you just try harder, you’ll succeed. They are mirrors and warnings, whispers and witnesses.”
That’s what we’ve forgotten. Stories aren’t supposed to be products. They aren’t supposed to be audition tapes for worthiness. They’re supposed to be a collective record—a way of saying: Here’s what I lived through. Here’s what I carried. Here’s what I saw.
Not here’s how you should copy me.
Not here’s how I earned my place on the train.
Not here’s the blueprint, perfectly packaged, only $19.99.
When stories become formulas, they stop being medicine. They stop being connective tissue. They become advertisements for survival inside the machine.
But when stories stay raw—when they’re allowed to remain messy, incomplete, even contradictory—they turn into mirrors. And mirrors show us not just who we are, but how deeply we belong to each other.
Echoes Everywhere
And when I step back, I see the echoes everywhere.
In Bottom of the Pool, I learned to question the limits placed on imagination.
In Leadership and Self-Deception, I saw how systems of denial and self-protection ripple outward as harm.
In The Grace Year, I saw how fear and scarcity are weaponized to keep women small.
In Grown and Small Great Things, I saw the ways trauma, racism, and survival twist together.
From Brené Brown, I learned that shame can only survive in silence.
From Gandhi, that nonviolence is not weakness but radical power.
From Muhammad Ali, that dignity means standing tall even when the system calls you unworthy.
From Hakeem Jeffries, Cory Booker, Jasmine Crockett—I hear that justice is not theory but persistence, carried in human voices refusing to shut up.
And that list isn’t extensive. Not even close. Every day I remember another book, another documentary, another TED Talk, another lived story whispered between the lines of a podcast—that all brought me to the same conclusion.
The universe has been sending us messages through a thousand different mouths.
But we forgot the collective. We forgot the community. And without connection to each other, we can’t see the connection between the messages.
The wisdom is here.
The warnings are here.
The answers are here.
What’s missing is the we.
What’s Missing
Do you see it? Do you see what’s missing?
In every version of Hitchhiker’s Guide, the characters scatter into their own obsessions:
Zaphod chasing chaos, ego, distraction.
Trillian chasing adventure, anything beyond the smallness she left behind.
Marvin drowning in despair, playing it off as irony.
Arthur clinging to nostalgia, longing for a home that no longer exists.
Ford drifting through, chasing entertainment and survival.
Each one represents a different survival strategy. Ego. Escape. Despair. Nostalgia. Distraction.
But what’s missing is anyone actually working together to ask the question.
And when Hollywood remixed the story in 2005, they doubled down on that absence. They added the love arc. They turned it into a triangle—Arthur wants Trillian, Zaphod wants Trillian, Trillian just wants adventure—and suddenly the ultimate question is obscured by the smaller, marketable question: who gets the girl?
Trillian isn’t even trying to be the answer. She isn’t trying to be chosen. She just wants freedom. She just wants to live without being trapped in survival mode. But the movie reframes her as the prize, instead of the seeker.
So instead of fumbling together toward meaning, every character gets boxed back into their own lonely pursuit.
And that’s the joke, isn’t it? That’s the sting. Everyone chasing the answer, everyone chasing the Question—but never together.
Which is exactly what our systems do to us now. Splinter the movements. Package the voices. Sell the stories. Distract us with triangles and boxes and seats on a runaway train. Anything to stop us from noticing what’s missing.
The we.
The Bridge Back
If we can see what’s missing in Hitchhiker’s, maybe we can finally see what’s missing in us. The characters weren’t failures because they didn’t find the Ultimate Question—they were failures because they never asked it together. And that’s where we are now. Everyone chasing answers alone. Everyone selling formulas. Everyone fighting over survival strategies. But until we step into the asking as a collective, the Question will always slip through our fingers.
The Invitation
So here’s my invitation:
Don’t just sit with my words—sit with your own questions. The ones you were told not to ask. The ones you thought were too big, too messy, too unanswerable. The ones you buried because survival demanded silence.
Write them down. Speak them out loud. Share them in circles that are brave enough to hold them. Because until we know what the real question is, no answer will ever be enough.
The answers are already here. The wisdom is already here. The only thing missing is the we.
And that’s where I want to go next: if not these systems—capitalism, communism, socialism, patriarchy, empire—then what? What do we build in their place?
That’s the essay I’ll be writing next. But for now, let’s pause here, at the edge of the question. Let’s not run back to easy answers. Let’s sit in the asking—together.
Until next time
I write these pieces because I believe remembering is resistance. The receipts are already here—in dusty archives, in forgotten speeches, in words printed more than a century ago by people who saw the same patterns we’re living through now. My work is to pull those echoes forward so we can’t pretend we weren’t warned. Even if my writing doesn’t change the world in my lifetime, I hope someone, somewhere will find this and be thankful for the work I’ve done. Until then, I’ll be racing the policies that may call for the end of my life, because “I’d rather write myself to death, than wait for politicians to do it instead.”
If this resonated with you, share it. Talk about it. And most of all—start tracing the blueprint for yourself. Once you see the design, you can’t unsee it.
I know I can’t—I see everywhere now.
—Amanda Lynn, the archivist of the silenced.
References & Further Study
This is not an exhaustive list. Every day I remember something else that shaped me, another voice that pulled a thread loose, another story that reminded me the answers are already here. These are simply the echoes in my head.
Books
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series — Douglas Adams
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency & The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul — Douglas Adams
Bottom of the Pool — Andy Andrews
Leadership and Self-Deception — The Arbinger Institute
The Servant Leader — James A. Autry
The Grace Year — Kim Liggett
Grown — Tiffany D. Jackson
Small Great Things — Jodi Picoult
Works by Brene Brown (Daring Greatly, Braving the Wilderness)
Last Chance to See — Douglas Adams & Mark Carwardine
Humankind — Rutger Bregman
Debt: The First 5,000 Years — David Graeber
Consider & Contribute — Kristy Acevedo
Inside Out & Outside In — Maria V. Snyder
The Forgetting & The Knowing — Sharon Cameron
Divergent series — Veronica Roth
Voices & Leaders
Gandhi
Muhammad Ali
Hakeem Jeffries
Cory Booker
Jasmine Crockett
Robert Reich
Gavin Newsom
V (Under the Desk News)
Megan (Generally Unquotable)
Kristi Burke (Jezebel Vibes)
Angela (Parkrose Permaculture)
Josh Johnson (comedian/storyteller)
Stephen Colbert
Movies & TV
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005 film)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1981 BBC series)
The Scarlet Pimpernel
Casablanca
Educational shows of the 80s & 90s (The Magic School Bus, Reading Rainbow)
The Social Dilemma (documentary)
13th (Ava DuVernay documentary)
Explained (Netflix docuseries)
Newsies (1992 film, echoes of labor resistance)
Podcasts & Channels
Breaking Down Patriarchy
Mormon Stories Podcast
Cults to Consciousness
Put Down the Shovel (therapist)
Toni Nagy (Come Inside Me Podcast)
Mickey Atkins (therapist/YouTube)
Jordan & McKay (ex-Mormon voices)
Zelph on the Shelf (ex-Mormon voices)
Mama Doctor Jones (medical education)
TED Talk: The Opposite of Addiction is Connection — Johann Hari
TED Talk: The Loneliness Epidemic — Vivek Murthy
Music
Alexandra Blakely
Icon for Hire
SkyDxddy
Delilah Bon
Scene Queen
Qveen Herby
New Medicine
Ozzy Osbourne & Black Sabbath
Other so-called “satan worshipping” bands whose lyrics often speak to collective survival, community, and coming together in defiance of systems meant to divide.
Final Note
These are only the echoes in my head. Yours will be different.
So before you take any of this as proof or formula, pause and ask yourself: does it resonate? Can you see these messages align with what your own lived experience is already telling you?
Check in with your body. Ask it to tell you the truth. Not the kind of promise I was taught to chase in scripture, not Moroni’s Promise, not a formula for salvation — but a quieter, embodied knowing.
Because sometimes your body will answer more honestly than the systems ever will.