The Wisdom of Insecurity

"This is a very thin book but a mind-blowing one. In many ways it was part of my motivation to write my book. Alan Watts was a philosophical populariser. He called himself a “spiritual entertainer”, and went around the world giving lectures and writing popular books about Eastern philosophies such as Zen Buddhism and Taoism. This book is about non-dualism – the theory that in some sense, everything is one. It’s the principle encapsulated in the symbols of yin and yang. These days it is often seen as cheesy and New Age. But there’s vastly more to it than that. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In this book Watts argues that the reason why we feel so insecure is because of all our struggles to feel secure. He was writing in the 1950s, but we surely feel just as insecure, indeed more so, today. He calls this “the law of reversed effort”. Our security-seeking efforts, like many other techniques of positivity, are all about trying to shore up our own egos – to make ourselves into well-defended, separate units. Watts argues that this is based on a fundamental failure to understand how life works. What he is pointing to is that the concepts of positive and negative are entwined, and must ultimately be transcended. Focusing on only one side of the human emotional repertoire doesn’t work. It denies life, and it denies reality. Trying to live a life that is only positive, Watts would argue, is like trying to imagine a wave that only has a crest and not a trough. Well, that’s not a wave."