In The Wisdom of Insecurity, first published in 1951, Alan Watts offers a diagnosis of what he calls the age of anxiety. The essay from The Marginalian returns to his central argument: people are frustrated not because life is uncertain, but because they habitually live for a future that is an abstraction. That future can never be experienced; it exists only as plans, predictions, hopes and worries.
Watts writes that if enjoying the present requires an assurance of a happy future, people are asking for the impossible. Even the best predictions are matters of probability, not certainty, and every person will suffer and die. Therefore a person who cannot live happily without an assured future is not adapted to a finite world in which accidents happen and death comes at the end.
According to Watts, the basic mind that knows reality rather than ideas about it does not know the future. It lives completely in the present and perceives only the present moment. The calculating brain studies memory and makes predictions. Those predictions are often reliable, such as the prediction that everyone will die, so the future comes to seem more real than the present. But the future cannot be eaten, felt, smelled, seen or heard. Chasing it is like pursuing a constantly retreating phantom: the faster a person chases it, the faster it runs ahead. This, he argues, is why so much of civilization rushes and why few people enjoy what they have.
Writing long before smartphones and the quantified self, Watts describes modern city dwellers as people living inside a machine, batted around by its wheels. Their days are spent counting and measuring within a world of rationalized abstraction, with little connection to biological rhythms. He observes that mechanical and electrical computers were already displacing the human computer, and warns that if the chief human value is calculation, man may become a parasitic appendage to clockwork. The point is not that thinking is useless, but that a life organized entirely around prediction and measurement loses contact with experience.
Watts does not reject the brain. Working rightly, he says, the brain is the highest form of instinctual wisdom, similar to the homing instinct of pigeons or the formation of a fetus in the womb, and it should work without verbalizing the process or knowing how it does it. The self-conscious brain, by contrast, is a disorder, like a self-conscious heart. It creates an acute feeling of separation between 'I' and my experience. The brain operates properly when consciousness is not writhing to escape present experience, but is effortlessly aware of it.
The search for security contains a contradiction, Watts writes. To seek security means to try to be separate from the flux of life, yet that very separateness is what makes a person insecure. To be secure means to isolate and fortify the 'I', but the feeling of being an isolated 'I' is what makes one lonely and afraid. The more security a person gets, the more they want. He puts it plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. A society based on the quest for security becomes a breath-retention contest in which everyone is taut and purple.
Watts is especially critical of self-improvement. A person can only try to improve themselves if they are split in two: there must be a good 'I' who will improve the bad 'me'. The struggle between the two stresses the sense of division, so the person feels more separate and more lonely. Happiness, he argues, is not a matter of improving or even confronting experience, but of remaining present with it. To understand insecurity, one must not face it but be it.
The essay also questions the idea of a fixed self. While watching present experience, Watts asks, can you find an experiencer in addition to the experience itself? When you read and then think 'I am reading', you have moved to a new experience; you are never aware of being aware. The idea of a separate thinker comes from memory and from the rapidity with which thought changes. But memory is itself a present experience. Trying to separate yourself from experience, he says, is as impossible as trying to make your teeth bite themselves.
To see this clearly, Watts argues, is to realize that life is entirely momentary, that there is no permanence or security, and that there is no separate 'I' that can be protected. Human frustration comes not only from death, pain, fear or hunger, but from the way we circle, buzz, writhe and whirl, trying to get the 'I' out of experience. Sanity, wholeness and integration lie in the realization that we are not divided, that man and present experience are one. To understand music, you must listen to it; so long as you think 'I am listening to this music', you are not listening.
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