We’re all busy, all the time. And yet, we seem to accomplish very little. The days and years slip away, and we find ourselves wondering what we did with all that time. Is there some secret, cosmic reason for this dismal state of affairs? Douglas Adams’ sci-fi classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy suggests that there is.

If you’re like most people, you read The Guide as a teenager, or saw one of the awful TV or movie versions of the story. You may recall that it involves the Earth being blown up by aliens, and that towels are considered important. And you probably know that 42 is the answer to “the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.”

Except it isn’t. At least, not in any meaningful way. There are five books in the Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy (yes, that’s an intentional incongruity, and a typical bit of Douglas Adams humor), and the second volume, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, delves into the meaning of 42. In a brilliant twist, Adams’ explanation also explains why we humans are so deeply and chronically dysfunctional.

According to Adams, the Earth is not what it appears to be. Rather, it is a massive experiment designed by an alien supercomputer called Deep Thought. Commissioned by a race of hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional beings to find the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, Deep Thought worked for 7.5 million years, only to announce that the answer was 42. This was, of course, completely unsatisfying because nobody knew what the question was.

Deep Thought, recognizing its own limitations, knew that it was unable to determine the Ultimate Question to which 42 was the answer. However, it was able to design another system that, after 10 million more years of computation, would provide the Question. The Earth is that system. Lovingly designed and assembled down to the last buried dinosaur bone, the Earth was seeded by planet-building specialists with a core population of human beings specifically engineered to unknowingly run Deep Thought’s Question-discovery program.

But, in The Guide universe, something always goes wrong, usually from an unexpected direction. In this case, a totally unrelated race of aliens called the Golgafrinchans decided to rid themselves of the most useless third of their population: bureaucrats, marketing executives, mid-level managers, and the like. Using the pretext that their planet was doomed, the Golgafrinchans tricked these unworthies into evacuating on “Ark Ship B,” and shot it off into space.

Predictably, Ark Ship B crash-landed on prehistoric Earth. The surviving Golgafrinchans promptly formed committees and started holding lengthy, unproductive meetings to discuss their situation. Their behavior was so toxic that the early humans, previously vibrant and energetic, quickly became listless and died off.

In other words, by displacing the original population of Earth, the Golgafrinchans corrupted the program that was designed to learn the Ultimate Question. This is why 42 remains an unhelpful answer, and why human society is so inherently defective. We are, in Adams satirical vision, not descended from bright, strong hominids, but from the aimless and incompetent detritus of an alien race. Thus, our innate propensity to create cumbersome bureaucracy, make unwise choices, and generally bungle things is not an anomaly, it is an inevitability.

The idea of Golgafrinchan ancestors may be fantasy, but it provides a salient analogy for the dysfunction we witness (and contribute to) daily. While we think of ourselves as being descended from the smartest and hardiest of our ancient ancestors, there is undeniably something in our DNA that drives us to engage in idiotic and self-defeating behavior.

In all likelihood, we aren’t actually descended from incompetent aliens. But Adams’ satire underscores an uncomfortable truth: our endless frenzy of activity is often inefficient and futile. Perhaps, like the characters in Adams’ story, this is because we think we know what “the answer” is, but we lack the question that would make sense of it. We endlessly gather information, but don’t ask how we can extract useful knowledge from it. We pursue goals, but don’t ask if they’re what we really want. We are constantly busy, but don’t ask if we’re accomplishing anything of value.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, not only is the Earth’s Question-discovery purpose ruined by the interference of the Golgafrinchans, but the entire planet is destroyed shortly by yet another set of aliens before the program was scheduled to finish. In the best absurdist tradition, Adams is using humor to tackle a serious topic: how many of us spend our entire lives fixated on things we never attain? Beneath the sci-fi slapstick, he seems to be challenging us: what if we focus less on the answers we are given, and more on the questions we need to ask?

Just as “42” doesn’t shed light on the nature of existence, spending our days running on a hamster wheel of unfulfilling activity doesn’t give our lives meaning. If we want to be better than our fictional Golgafrinchan forbears, we have to make the conscious decision to think carefully about what we want to do, why we want to do it, and whether we’re going about it the right way. Even without all the answers, having the right questions can point us in the right direction. At the very least, like any galactic hitchhiker, it might be worthwhile to ask, “Where are we going, and do we really want to go there?”