“Success means getting up at 5am, punishing ourselves at the gym and then producing, producing, producing,” writes Arwa Mahdawi in 2018 The Guardian opinion piece. “I have frequent anxiety attacks where I feel as if I’m not doing enough, achieving enough, earning enough.”
As sad as it may sound, but one has to look far and wide to find a better description of our modern life. In just two sentences, the young journalist distilled the essence of our whole existence — a world of fruitless labor interleaved by anxiety and feeling of not being enough.
Wake up at 5am and produce, produce, produce — to what end? Why is it that we’re willingly pushing this heavy boulder up a mountain of endless pain and suffering? This is one of many questions the visionary iconoclast and a man of immense wisdom Alan Watts (6 January 1915–16 November 1973) explores in his book Wisdom of Insecurity: a Message for an Age of Anxiety.
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Human beings, Alan Watts argues, appear to be happy as long as they have a future to which they look forward to. Since time immemorial, there have been two conceptions of light at the end of a tunnel — that of “good time” tomorrow or an everlasting life beyond the grave. The disillusionment with the former comes at the hand of an alarm clock striking 5am on Monday morning, the disillusionment with the latter comes at the hand of science. Alan Watts writes:
The decay of belief has come about through the honest doubt, the careful and fearless thinking of highly intelligent men of science and philosophy. Moved by a zeal and reverence for facts, they have tried to see, understand, and face life as it is without wishful thinking. Yet for all that they have done to improve the conditions of life, their picture of the universe seems to leave the individual without ultimate hope. The price of their miracles in this world has been the disappearance of the world-to-come, and one is inclined to as the old question, “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?” Logic, intelligence, and reason are satisfied, but the heart goes hungry. For the heart has learned to feel that we live for the future. Science may, slowly and uncertainly, give us a better future — for a few years. And then, for each of us, it will end. It will all end. However long postponed, everything composed must decompose.
“The modern scientist is not so naive as to deny God because he cannot be found with a telescope, or the soul because it is not revealed by the scalpel,” writes Alan Watts. All the scientist can do is to honestly assert that the idea of God, or afterlife, or of sacred is logically unnecessary. The consequence of this approach, however, is the hollow world we tread every day of our life. Alan Watts writes:
The immediate results of this honesty have been deeply unsettling and depressing. For man seems to be unable to live without myth, without the belief that the routine and drudgery, the pain and fear of this life have some meaning and goal in the future. At once new myths come into being — political and economic myths with extravagant promises of the best of futures in the present world. These myths give the individual a certain sense of meaning by making him part of a vast social effort, in which he loses something of his own emptiness and loneliness. Yet the very violence of these political religions betrays the anxiety beneath them — for they are but men huddling together and shouting to give themselves courage in the dark.
Essential and necessary in its entirety, The Wisdom of Insecurity will be your light to face the dark and see through it. Complement with another beacon of hope who’s light have gone out but still in our hearts — the luminous mind of Albert Einstein on the dichotomy of science and religion.
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