Two overriding questions for my life have been something like: "What is reality?" and "Who or what am I relative to this reality?" I have to confess I have not found too many people interested in those questions.
Some dismiss those questions with whatever beliefs the cultural or their personal history hands out to soothe the soul. In the case of America, Christianity would provide stock answers. In the Middle East, Islam would provide stock answers, except for Israel where Judaism would offer different explanations. And with those answers most people return to the normal life, happy to anethesize and lock away the unease that would otherwise bubble up. And then they get back to the "real" business of life: breathing, eating, excreting, sleeping, and procreating with their attention now fully bent to doing those things in ever more comfortable conditions.
Some, like my friend Dick, are so extroverted that it never seems to occur to them that such questions exists -- certainly not as anything disturbing or important. I doubt Dick ever had an introspective moment in his life. He was totally enchanted and absorbed by the social and "thingy" world he believed to be completely exterior to him. Even himself, he perceived to be an exterior object on a totally absorbing stage of moving things and people. Despite not considering those questions, he was a nice guy, mostly ethical and fair, and at times for me, a helpful antidote to occasions of over-serious introspection.
Some seem a bit terrified of the questions. It's not so much they accept the answers the culture offers up in order to return to slumber, as it is fear if that if the question is probed, they might be swept into a dementer's hell of meaningless unimportance where their suffering is just the unheard scream in an unending blackness of space which cannot perceive, let alone care. They grasp with desperation at whatever belief system -- usually a familiar one -- that seems to offer rescue them from the abyss they think they face.
And then there's the scientist. They have become dominant in questions about reality and have cast shadow over the other means of addressing the deepest questions that confront humans. What they have in their favor is a methodology that rigorously examines reality and truth with experiment. Truth that can be knowable by objective, repeatable experiments is the limited realm of the scientist. That, in itself is a vast and useful realm. But that realm is incomplete. There are those few remarkable physicists in the world who grasp that at the end of their concepts about time, form, and space there is just continuing mystery -- even about what the fundamentals of time, form, and space are. But the average scientist doesn't tread there, and insists that the world he knows experimentally is the real existent world and that anything not known or are not knowable that way is false. These crippled scientists, in the same mode of thinking as their religionist counterparts, make bold claim that "God doesn't or can't exist" because it can't be proven scientifically, and that anything not provable scientifically is false, rotten, and religion borne of primitive ignorance. They live in a shaky world where they become crippled in their ability to explore anything that can't be reduced to science. They are scornful, arrogant, and wrong in just the same way the religionist is by his faith. The depth of the questions asked here are given certain, adamant answers based on generally agreed science, without the apparent ability to question either the limits of scientific understanding or their truncated understanding of it. Scientific answers are incomplete. Good scientists know that, and are willing to acknowledge that uncertainty of knowledge as the very hallmark of good scientific inquiry. Poor and mediocre scientists ignore uncertainty because they are too intellectually dull to perceive it or have brushed it aside in their interest to assuage it.
After decades of exploration of this question, I've come to the conclusion I still don't know the answers. There are tantalizing clues, but they are only footprints in snow which suggest there may be reason to search in this direction. I'm becoming more comfortable with that mystery -- that "cloud of unknowing" -- being integral to the joy of living and human intelligence, rather than an annoying remainder to be ignored by means of claiming that it is "already known" or discarded as worthless because it is beyond reach.