The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

Watts begins the second chapter, as philosophers often do, by noting the differences between human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom. Whereas most animals are content with the simple pleasures of their immediate experience, humans are subject to a greater openness to time and therefore think more about their past and their future. Human beings have larger brains and correspondingly more expansive mental capacities, which, for Watts, is both a blessing and a curse. Our sensitivity adds to the “richness of life,” but it also makes us “liable to intense pains” (29-30).

For Watts there is a direct relationship between how much we value life and how troubled we are by death. Similarly, how intensely we feel pleasure corresponds to how intensely we feel pain. He writes of the “partial suicides” (31), or those who have, out of fear, made themselves insensible to most pleasures and pains. A complete human life requires the willingness to suffer. Since change, death, and the impermanence of all things are an integral part of life, they cannot be done away with.

The problem is not bound up with the fact of pain, but rather with “our consciousness of time” (31), which ensnares us in the past and future rather than the present.