The Socratic method, used on your own situation

Why does it have to be this way, and why can’t it be something different?

Question 1 of the Index

Most of what is written about the Socratic method describes a classroom or a courtroom, where one person already knows the answer and is walking another person toward it. That is a teaching technique wearing the name. The method itself is older and blunter, and it is not a technique for winning.

It is one move. Take the thing everyone agrees on, including you, and ask why it has to be that way. Not as provocation. As a genuine question with an answer that might be good. Most arrangements survive the question, and the ones that survive it are stronger afterwards because they now have a reason attached rather than an inheritance.

The ones that do not survive it are the interesting ones. They turn out to rest on a constraint that expired, a person who is no longer in the room, or a decision somebody made once for reasons that made sense at the time and never revisited. You have several of those and they are invisible for the same reason gravity is.

What makes this hard to do alone is that you are the one who agreed. The premise feels like the floor rather than like a claim, and you cannot pull on a floor you are standing on. It takes something outside your own head to hold the question open past the point where you would ordinarily answer it and move on.