A 2014 essay from The Marginalian returns to Alan Watts’s 1951 book The Wisdom of Insecurity, arguing that his diagnosis of distraction and mental gluttony is strikingly applicable to today’s screen-saturated culture. The piece positions Watts’s concern not as nostalgia but as a warning about how constant stimulation can crowd out the present.
Watts begins from the idea that much frustration stems from living for the future. In his account, the “primary consciousness” knows reality directly and lives completely in the present, while the “ingenious brain” studies memory and makes predictions. Because those predictions are often accurate, the future takes on a reality so strong that the present loses its value.
Yet the future cannot be eaten, felt, smelled, seen, heard or otherwise enjoyed; it is made of inferences, guesses and deductions. To pursue it is to pursue a constantly retreating phantom: the faster one chases it, the faster it runs ahead. This, Watts argues, is why civilized life feels rushed and why people hardly enjoy what they have while forever seeking more. Happiness becomes tied to promises, hopes and assurances rather than solid realities.
He also describes an economy that must manufacture more and more pleasures or collapse. It provides a constant titillation of ears, eyes and nerve ends with near-inescapable noise and visual distractions. The perfect subject, in his words, is the person who continually itches his ears with a portable radio and whose eyes flit without rest from television screen to newspaper to magazine.
That experience, Watts says, keeps people in a kind of “orgasm-without-release.” It does so through teasing glimpses of shiny automobiles, shiny female bodies and other sensuous surfaces, interspersed with shock treatments such as “human interest” images of criminals, mangled bodies, wrecked airplanes, prize fights and burning buildings. The accompanying literature or discourse is likewise manufactured to tease without satisfaction, replacing every partial gratification with a new desire.
The essay highlights a sentence that seems aimed at the age of screens, data and the quantified self: “The brainy modern loves not matter but measures, no solids but surfaces.” It also notes the irony that Watts, who later had a cameo in Spike Jonze’s Siri-centric film Her, used language reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s warning about the moving image to presage the mesmerism of screens, devices and feeds. More than half a century before flashing videos and animated GIFs, Watts observed the same effect in the media of his day.
The Marginalian notes that Watts was the opposite of a techno-dystopian. He was a champion of the human spirit and its capacity for freedom. His lament is therefore not a curmudgeonly complaint but an honest concern about daily choices, and a gentle reminder, echoed by Annie Dillard, that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives.
The rest of The Wisdom of Insecurity, the essay says, explores how to transcend futile strategies for controlling life and surrender to its living essence. The article also connects Watts’s point to earlier voices such as Lewis Carroll, who warned against “mental gluttony,” and Saul Bellow, who wrote that “if the remission of pain is happiness, then the emergence from distraction is aesthetic bliss.”
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