ESSENTIAL READING
Alan Watts wrote this in 1951 and gave it the subtitle A Message for an Age of Anxiety, which suggests he had some idea of how it would age.
His argument is uncomfortable in a productive way. The problem is not that you have not yet achieved security. The problem is the pursuit itself, because the pursuit requires you to spend the present preparing for a future that will arrive as another present you are too busy preparing to notice.
THE BOOK
The Wisdom of Insecurity is short and moves quickly.
Watts starts from a claim about what makes human anxiety distinctive. Animals experience fear in the presence of a threat. People experience fear about threats that are not present, may never arrive and exist only as thought. We can imagine the future, which is enormously useful, and the same capacity means we can suffer things that have not happened.
From there he builds towards the position that the demand for security is the mechanism. Every attempt to secure yourself acknowledges the possibility of loss and therefore reinforces the anxiety it was meant to resolve. The more thoroughly you defend, the more there is to defend.
His alternative is not resignation. It is attention. He argues that the experience people actually want from a secure future is available only in a present they are not currently occupying.
THE AUTHOR
Alan Watts was born in England in 1915 and became one of the earliest and most readable interpreters of Zen Buddhism, Taoism and Hindu thought for Western audiences.
He moved to the United States in the late 1930s, was ordained as an Episcopal priest and served as a chaplain before leaving the church around 1950. He then spent the rest of his life writing, broadcasting and lecturing, and became closely associated with the counterculture of the 1960s in California. He died in 1973.
He was a popularizer rather than a practitioner, and he said so. He was also very good at the job. He is one of the few writers who can present a difficult idea from a tradition most readers know nothing about and make it land in a paragraph.
THE CENTRAL IDEA
The strongest section is about the self doing the securing.
Watts argues that the "I" attempting to make itself safe is not a thing but an abstraction: a construction assembled out of memory, anticipation and a running commentary about experience. What people call thinking about their life is largely this commentary. It sits between the person and the experience and produces a persistent low-grade sense of being one step removed from your own life.
His claim is that the attempt to secure that self is doomed on structural grounds, because the self it is protecting is not a stable object in the first place.
The second idea is his treatment of the present, and it is more precise than the phrase "live in the moment" suggests. Watts is not recommending impulsiveness or telling you to stop planning. He is pointing out that planning is only worth doing if the planned-for moment eventually gets lived, and that a person can build the habit of never arriving. Each present becomes preparation for the next one. Nothing is ever the thing itself.
The third is that certainty and aliveness are in tension. A completely secured life would also be a completely predictable one, and the qualities people actually value, including surprise, love and discovery, all require exposure to outcomes you did not arrange.
WHAT IT IS USEFUL FOR
It is for the person whose anxiety is not attached to a specific problem.
That version is difficult to address, because there is nothing to solve. You have handled the thing you were worried about and the worry relocated. Watts's account explains why: the worry was never about that thing. It is a mode, and it does not resolve by being fed.
It is also useful for anybody in a permanently preparatory season. When the promotion happens, when the house is finished, when the year settles down. Watts is very good at exposing how long a person can live in that construction without noticing.
READ IT WITH THIS IN MIND
Watts is a persuasive writer and not a careful one. He asserts, he does not argue, and he moves fast enough that a weak claim can slip past on the strength of the sentence. Read him for the reframe, not for evidence.
This is also not a book about clinical anxiety and should not be treated as one. Philosophical insight is not a treatment. If anxiety is interfering with your life, this is reading, not care.
And the argument can be pushed into something that looks like an excuse not to plan or to take responsibility. Watts is arguing against a specific relationship with the future, not against having one.
IF YOU TAKE ONE THING
Ask whether you are living in the present or maintaining it for later use.
Watts's point is that later is made of exactly the same material, and that the habit of postponement travels with you into it.