Alan Watts on Anxiety and Happiness

An Antidote to the Age of Anxiety: Alan Watts on Happiness and How to Live with Presence

by Maria Popova

Wisdom on overcoming the greatest human frustration from the pioneer of Eastern philosophy in the West.

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard wrote in her timeless reflection on presence over productivity — a timely antidote to the central anxiety of our productivity-obsessed age. Indeed, my own New Year’s resolution has been to stop measuring my days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence. But what, exactly, makes that possible?
This concept of presence is rooted in Eastern notions of mindfulness — the ability to go through life with crystalline awareness and fully inhabit our experience — largely popularized in the West by British philosopher and writer Alan Watts (January 6, 1915–November 16, 1973), who also gave us this fantastic meditation on the life of purpose. In the altogether excellent 1951 volume The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (public library), Watts argues that the root of our human frustration and daily anxiety is our tendency to live for the future, which is an abstraction. He writes:

If to enjoy even an enjoyable present we must have the assurance of a happy future, we are “crying for the moon.” We have no such assurance. The best predictions are still matters of probability rather than certainty, and to the best of our knowledge every one of us is going to suffer and die. If, then, we cannot live happily without an assured future, we are certainly not adapted to living in a finite world where, despite the best plans, accidents will happen, and where death comes at the end.

Alan Watts, early 1970s (Image courtesy of Everett Collection)

What keeps us from happiness, Watts argues, is our inability to fully inhabit the present:

The “primary consciousness,” the basic mind which knows reality rather than ideas about it, does not know the future. It lives completely in the present, and perceives nothing more than what is at this moment. The ingenious brain, however, looks at that part of present experience called memory, and by studying it is able to make predictions. These predictions are, relatively, so accurate and reliable (e.g., “everyone will die”) that the future assumes a high degree of reality — so high that the present loses its value.
But the future is still not here, and cannot become a part of experienced reality until it is present. Since what we know of the future is made up of purely abstract and logical elements — inferences, guesses, deductions — it cannot be eaten, felt, smelled, seen, heard, or otherwise enjoyed. To pursue it is to pursue a constantly retreating phantom, and the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead. This is why all the affairs of civilization are rushed, why hardly anyone enjoys what he has, and is forever seeking more and more. Happiness, then, will consist, not of solid and substantial realities, but of such abstract and superficial things as promises, hopes, and assurances.

Watts argues that our primary mode of relinquishing presence is by leaving the body and retreating into the mind — that ever-calculating, self-evaluating, seething cauldron of thoughts, predictions, anxieties, judgments, and incessant meta-experiences about experience itself. Writing more than half a century before our age of computers, touch-screens, and the quantified self, Watts admonishes:

The brainy modern loves not matter but measures, no solids but surfaces.
[…]
The working inhabitants of a modern city are people who live inside a machine to be batted around by its wheels. They spend their days in activities which largely boil down to counting and measuring, living in a world of rationalized abstraction which has little relation to or harmony with the great biological rhythms and processes. As a matter of fact, mental activities of this kind can now be done far more efficiently by machines than by men — so much so that in a not too distant future the human brain may be an obsolete mechanism for logical calculation. Already the human computer is widely displaced by mechanical and electrical computers of far greater speed and efficiency. If, then, man’s principal asset and value is his brain and his ability to calculate, he will become an unsaleable commodity in an era when the mechanical operation of reasoning can be done more effectively by machines.
[…]
If we are to continue to live for the future, and to make the chief work of the mind prediction and calculation, man must eventually become a parasitic appendage to a mass of clockwork.

To be sure, Watts doesn’t dismiss the mind as a worthless or fundamentally perilous human faculty. Rather, he insists that it if we let its unconscious wisdom unfold unhampered — like, for instance, what takes place during the “incubation” stage of unconscious processing in the creative process — it is our ally rather than our despot. It is only when we try to control it and turn it against itself that problems arise:

Working rightly, the brain is the highest form of “instinctual wisdom.” Thus it should work like the homing instinct of pigeons and the formation of the fetus in the womb — without verbalizing the process or knowing “how” it does it. The self-conscious brain, like the self-conscious heart, is a disorder, and manifests itself in the acute feeling of separation between “I” and my experience. The brain can only assume its proper behavior when consciousness is doing what it is designed for: not writhing and whirling to get out of present experience, but being effortlessly aware of it.

And yet the brain does writhe and whirl, producing our great human insecurity and existential anxiety amidst a universe of constant flux. (For, as Henry Miller memorably put it, “It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis.”) Paradoxically, recognizing that the experience of presence is the only experience is also a reminder that our “I” doesn’t exist beyond this present moment, that there is no permanent, static, and immutable “self” which can grant us any degree of security and certainty for the future — and yet we continue to grasp for precisely that assurance of the future, which remains an abstraction. Our only chance for awakening from this vicious cycle, Watts argues, is bringing full awareness to our present experience — something very different from judging it, evaluating it, or measuring it up against some arbitrary or abstract ideal. He writes:

There is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity. But the contradiction lies a little deeper than the mere conflict between the desire for security and the fact of change. If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life, I am wanting to be separate from life. Yet it is this very sense of separateness which makes me feel insecure. To be secure means to isolate and fortify the “I,” but it is just the feeling of being an isolated “I” which makes me feel lonely and afraid. In other words, the more security I can get, the more I shall want.
To put it still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.

He takes especial issue with the very notion of self-improvement — something particularly prominent in the season of New Year’s resolutions — and admonishes against the implication at its root:

I can only think seriously of trying to live up to an ideal, to improve myself, if I am split in two pieces. There must be a good “I” who is going to improve the bad “me.” “I,” who has the best intentions, will go to work on wayward “me,” and the tussle between the two will very much stress the difference between them. Consequently “I” will feel more separate than ever, and so merely increase the lonely and cut-off feelings which make “me” behave so badly.

Happiness, he argues, isn’t a matter of improving our experience, or even merely confronting it, but remaining present with it in the fullest possible sense:

To stand face to face with insecurity is still not to understand it. To understand it, you must not face it but be it. It is like the Persian story of the sage who came to the door of Heaven and knocked. From within the voice of God asked, “Who is there” and the sage answered, “It is I.” “In this House,” replied the voice, “there is no room for thee and me.” So the sage went away, and spent many years pondering over this answer in deep meditation. Returning a second time, the voice asked the same question, and again the sage answered, “It is I.” The door remained closed. After some years he returned for the third time, and, at his knocking, the voice once more demanded, “Who is there?” And the sage cried, “It is thyself!” The door was opened.

We don’t actually realize that there is no security, Watts asserts, until we confront the myth of fixed selfhood and recognize that the solid “I” doesn’t exist — something modern psychology has termed “the self illusion”. And yet that is incredibly hard to do, for in the very act of this realization there is a realizing self. Watts illustrates this paradox beautifully:

While you are watching this present experience, are you aware of someone watching it? Can you find, in addition to the experience itself, an experiencer? Can you, at the same time, read this sentence and think about yourself reading it? You will find that, to think about yourself reading it, you must for a brief second stop reading. The first experience is reading. The second experience is the thought, “I am reading.” Can you find any thinker, who is thinking the thought, I am reading?” In other words, when present experience is the thought, “I am reading,” can you think about yourself thinking this thought?
Once again, you must stop thinking just, “I am reading.” You pass to a third experience, which is the thought, “I am thinking that I am reading.” Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into the feeling that you think them all at once.
[…]
In each present experience you were only aware of that experience. You were never aware of being aware. You were never able to separate the thinker from the thought, the knower from the known. All you ever found was a new thought, a new experience.

What makes us unable to live with pure awareness, Watts points out, is the ball and chain of our memory and our warped relationship with time:

The notion of a separate thinker, of an “I” distinct from the experience, comes from memory and from the rapidity with which thought changes. It is like whirling a burning stick to give the illusion of a continuous circle of fire. If you imagine that memory is a direct knowledge of the past rather than a present experience, you get the illusion of knowing the past and the present at the same time. This suggests that there is something in you distinct from both the past and the present experiences. You reason, “I know this present experience, and it is different from that past experience. If I can compare the two, and notice that experience has changed, I must be something constant and apart.”
But, as a matter of fact, you cannot compare this present experience with a past experience. You can only compare it with a memory of the past, which is a part of the present experience. When you see clearly that memory is a form of present experience, it will be obvious that trying to separate yourself from this experience is as impossible as trying to make your teeth bite themselves.
[…]
To understand this is to realize that life is entirely momentary, that there is neither permanence nor security, and that there is no “I” which can be protected.

And therein lies the crux of our human struggle:

The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the “I” out of the experience. We pretend that we are amoebas, and try to protect ourselves from life by splitting in two. Sanity, wholeness, and integration lie in the realization that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate “I” or mind can be found.
To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, “I am listening to this music,” you are not listening.

The Wisdom of Insecurity is immeasurably wonderful — existentially necessary, even — in its entirety, and one of those books bound to stay with you for a lifetime.

Inherited Insecurity

             Holidays bombard the mind--the sweets and meat sweats, the nog-fueled family games and consequential brawls. It is without a doubt, the most haywire time of any year. Everything seems magnified—feasts, gifts, love, loneliness. For anyone teetering on insanity, this is the time to go ham. I’ve surfed this holiday season high like a pro. But, as Newton assured us, there is always a come down; it’s science. 
             I write this at our breakfast bar on another bluebird Colorado morning. The parental units have made their exit to the daily grind in an agro-rush, to-do lists abounding, while I take my time with the morning, make another cup of coffee and let that feeling sink in. You know, the feeling when everyone else in your life seems to have a plan, a purpose, even if it makes them miserable and you sit, twiddling thumbs, eerily content yet maddeningly concerned. I wonder if the Germans have a word for this (they have a word for everything); I shall simply call it ‘postcollegiateangst.’

            If there were such a place in which this psychosocial state would be less of a burden, my hometown should be up there. In fact, I will admit that Glenwood Springs, Colorado is quite exquisite—with landscapes worthy of Ansel Adams’ praise for days and colorful people to fill the space between takes. Living in this high mountain valley of Colorado is a dream, for anyone but those who grew up here.

            You know how it is, coming home. It is the kind of place where everyone knows your name, and that of your parents, and grandparents. And the whole time you’ve been gone, some grand tale has been squeezed down the gossip drain of work-out mom groups and hockey dads as to what you’ve been up to. University is an easy scapegoat; it’s like a coupon for four years out of their microscope of scrutiny. But man, once you dawn that cap, get ready for the firing squad of interrogators. I suppose this—what I like to call ‘small-town syndrome’—and a mélange of my sociocultural upbringing is the reason why every time I come home, no matter what time or space in life I occupy, I feel like a failure.

            I have made the habit of jittering my way through daily tasks with the kind of subtle anxiety that follows hyper-caffeination. A few nights ago, my Dad arrived home from work and I was a veritable mess—cooking, crying, laughing, making excel spreadsheets to map out my life.

            “Hey Kendall Nicole,” he beamed, “how was your day?”

            I shrugged my shoulders and broke down, “I feel worthless Pops.” He enveloped me in a bear hug. I shared with him my fears of this space in my life—where everything is uncertain and responsibilities are endless. I had recently made the decision to move to Portland, Oregon. All prodigious decisions ensue rippling doubt in their wake—did I make the right choice, how will I find work, I don’t have a network—etc.

            My father quelled my discontent with a dose of perspective, as he always does, “Kendall, I can’t imagine much else in the world should scare you considering where you have been and what you have accomplished.”

            This comment really got me thinking about the unsettling aura that has taken refuge in the folds of my prefrontal cortex. It is a societal script of inadequacy that women internalize. We are taught to become smaller, grow inward not outward— never give ourselves well-deserved credit or the benefit of the doubt. There is a self-esteem epidemic among my fellow ladies of the West and I think it is insidiously impeding our progress as humans with incredible talent for change and success.

            How peculiar is that I am so much more comfortable being abroad? I am not afraid to make mistakes or a fool out of myself; I have faith that everything will work out because it has to. In harsh juxtaposition, my home environment makes me question everything—my future, my body, my life-choices. Granted, women are treated atrociously in India, but there is certainly something about our society that degenerates women’s/human’s confidence.

            Perhaps it is a matter of context and this space carries age-old triggers specific to my conditioning, while being in a foreign land allows one to form a new self-concept irrespective of place, people, and past. When you are participating in another society you can always distance yourself from the cultural problems you witness; you can throw up your hands in surrender and think, “this place is crazy.” But when observing social issues at home, it is not something so easily ignored because it is in our mother cultures that we see a reflection of ourselves.

            One aspect of our culture that I find pressures young adults into settling for a safe,  ‘correct’ life (by societal standards), as opposed to pursuing their unique passions, is the premium placed on absolutes. Whether or not we are willing to admit it, we are dualists who thrive on certainty. I blame the religion of science for this mode of thinking—and consumerism. We categorically organize our world because that is what our culture values—a box and complementary explanation for everything. This mental technique, although extremely efficient, doesn’t allow a space for revering the unknown. If us ladies don’t fit into the ‘box’ of perfection as laid out by advertising companies and pop-culture, we render ourselves worthless as individuals.

            Perhaps us Westerners have become accustomed to playing God, but one of many things I learned in India is that we have little control over our lives in terms of macro-level planning. We must submit to the moment and trust that this is exactly where we need to be. Isn’t it true that most genuinely good things in life come to fruition at the whim of what some may call fate? The trick here is learning to have faith in said fate.

            I believe that we only have control insofar as our attitudes, emotions, and thought patterns. Opportunities will only present themselves when the mind is receptive. Thoughts are not innocuous; they have immense energy, carving neural pathways in their wake. These patterns have the ability to create Grand Canyons of mental dysfunction, from whose valley belly we can no longer see the sun. It is truly an amazing magic trick—telling yourself something enough times that you become convinced of its validity—regardless of its basis in rationale. Only if we learn to bolster self-love and dam destructive alleys can we lessen the grip of toxic cultural bombardment. That said, the ability to control mental erosion is a talent of Buddhaesque proportions, although certainly a skill worth cultivating.

            No matter how ‘zen’ the mind, women can’t help but internalize the patriarchal scaffolding of our society. With increased spelunking into the folds of my prefrontal cortex, I have called forth the unsettling aura of self-doubt, interrogating to reveal its nascence. The cultural dogma that assigns greater value to masculinity and objectifies femininity quietly traumatizes female psyches across the world. It is a dialogue of inadequacy that women internalize upon comparing themselves to ‘what women should be.’ We are taught to become smaller, grow inward not outward— never give ourselves well-deserved credit or the benefit of the doubt. The end result is a chronic self-depreciating epidemic, fostered in a soil of shame, that is insidiously impeding women’s progress to be recognized (within and without) as humans who hold up ‘half the sky’.  

            Dr.Gershan Kaufman writes about the psychology of shame and its roots in three American cultural scripts of success, independence, and conformity. The success script values those who ‘pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. As Kaufman writes, “competing for success and achieving by external standards of performance are the clarion calls of culture,” and eventually, “achievement becomes the measure of self-esteem, of one’s intrinsic worth or adequacy.” Dr. Kaufman continues to elaborate on the idea that if individuals don’t achieve the American-dream level of success, they are immediately viewed as failures; “simply being average must seem a curse.” The independence script values the ‘lone-rangers’ who don’t burden others with issues or accept help. The ‘go-it-alone’ attitude hinders the expression of our very essence as social beings. The conformity script is simple enough to understand; our culture doesn’t accept people who are different, in the minority, or outside our high expectations of mental/physical/professional/emotional/familial perfection.

            If you noticed, the aforementioned scripts generating our shame-culture involve the praise of hyper-masculinity and condemnation of care, vulnerability, patience, trust, community, and empathy—all feminine attributes that psychologists believe are rudimentary to combating shame.

            Dr.Brene Brown, a social worker from Texas—a fantastic lady whose work I have been a fan of for a while now—is a shame reseracher. Brown defines shame as,

“an intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging. Women often experience shame when they are entangled in a web of layered, conflicting and competing social-community expectations. Shame creates feelings of fear, blame and disconnection.”

            We all know shame very well; that gut-feeling of “I’m not worthy” that can ruin your whole day. It limits opportunities of exposing yourself or taking chances at greatness due to a festering fear of failure or rejection.  Dr. Brown calls for women especially to start practicing authenticity in their lives—and the path to authentic living is through the forest of vulnerability where shame needs to be recognized, shared, and combated with genuine love for the self, as-is. She recognizes that,

“To love someone fiercely, to believe in something with your whole heart, to celebrate a fleeting moment in time, to fully engage in a life that doesn’t come with guarantees – these are risks that involve vulnerability and often pain. But, I’m learning that recognizing and leaning into the discomfort of vulnerability teaches us how to live with joy, gratitude and grace.”

            Dr. Brown’s call for humanity to live ‘whole-heartedly’ is liberating. I fully recommend reading any of her books, but my personal favorite is The Gifts of Imperfection.

            In the words of Ross Rosenburg , it all comes down to the question, “are you a human doing or a human being?” When we measure our self-worth by what we ‘do’ rather than who we ‘are,’ shame is bound to rule our lives because the proverbial carrots of our society are simply unattainable. We, as humans, must learn to embrace this culturally inherited insecurity as a condition of living a genuine life. Fear will always continue to lurk in the corners of our mind, and shame will burrow its way into our consciousness, but recognizing these emotions and thought patterns as part of the dark that attracts the light allows us to live genuine lives. As Dr. Brown so eloquently states: 

“The dark does not destroy the light; it defines it. It's our fear of the dark that casts our joy into the shadows… To become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good. It means growing gentler toward human weakness. It means practicing forgiveness of my and everyone else's hourly failures to live up to divine standards. It means learning to forget myself on a regular basis in order to attend to the other selves in my vicinity. It means living so that "I'm only human" does not become an excuse for anything. It means receiving the human condition as blessing and not curse, in all its achingly frail and redemptive reality.”