A short piece from The Marginalian, published in October 2012, revisits a question posed by the British philosopher Alan Watts: what would you do if money were no object?
Watts, who lived from 1915 to 1973 and wrote the cult-classic The Way of Zen, is described as a key figure who helped popularize Eastern philosophy in the West in the middle of the 20th century, as John Cage had done.
The article presents the question as part of a larger exploration of how to find your purpose and do what you love.
Its blunt central argument is that saying money is the most important thing means spending your life completely wasting your time. In that mindset, a person does work they do not like in order to go on living, which only means continuing to do work they do not like — a cycle Watts calls stupid.
The piece does not offer a career plan or a definite answer. It uses Watts’s question as a way of examining what would actually deserve your attention and energy.
Because the text is brief, it works more as a prompt than as an in-depth study. Its value is in returning the reader to a basic but easily postponed question about the shape of a meaningful life.
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