How do we raise children, design classrooms, and build societies when we don’t even know what the purpose of life is? Can awe—not certainty—be the compass that guides education?

Today’s guest is Goutham Yegappan, the host of ReEducated, a podcast that seeks to reimagine education from the ground up. As he prepares to launch a new season of the show, Goutham turns the mic inward for a reflective monologue that wrestles with the most fundamental questions: Why educate? Why care about the future at all? And what does it mean to learn when certainty may never come?

In this solo episode, Goutham shares his evolving philosophy on education, mortality, and meaning. Prompted by a conversation in Japan—"How do you even know it’s better to be a human than a worm?"—he traces how this question catalyzed an entire season of interviews with anthropologists, artists, and educators. Again and again, the answer eluded them. No one could definitively say why human life should be sustained. And yet, there was a common thread in every response: the experience of being human—of wonder, of creation, of love—might be reason enough.

Rather than offering answers, this episode models a way of living with the unknown. It invites us to build education systems not on the illusion of certainty but on the pursuit of complexity, mystery, and awe. Goutham proposes that perhaps the most profound act of learning isn’t mastering knowledge, but developing the capacity to be in relationship with what we may never fully understand. This conversation is a deeply personal, philosophical call to rethink how and why we learn.