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I have always been fascinated by the law of reversed effort. Sometimes I call it ‘the backwards law’. When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float . . . insecurity is the result of trying to be secure . . . contrariwise, salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves. – Alan Watts,
The awkward truth seems to be that increased economic growth does not necessarily make for happier societies, just as increased personal income, above a certain basic level, doesn’t make for happier people. Nor does better education, at least according to some studies. Nor does an increased choice of consumer products. Nor do bigger and fancier homes, which instead seem mainly to provide the privilege of more space in which to feel gloomy.
in all sorts of contexts, from our personal lives to politics, all this trying to make everything right is a big part of what’s wrong.
It is only to the absolutely horrific that we respond with blind terror; all other fears are finite, and thus susceptible to being coped with.
Pain is inevitable, from this perspective, but suffering is an optional extra, resulting from our attachments, which represent our attempt to try to deny the unavoidable truth that everything is impermanent.
it highlights the way that we tend to confuse acting with feeling like acting,
Our life experience teaches that it is not necessary to change our feelings in order to take action . . . Once we learn to accept our feelings, we find that we can take action without changing our feeling-states.’ We can feel the fear, and do it anyway.
many of us, and many of the organisations for which we work, would do better to spend less time on goalsetting, and, more generally, to focus with less intensity on planning for how we would like the future to turn out.
investigation revealed that the culprit was goals. New York taxi drivers rent their vehicles in twelve-hour shifts, and commonly set themselves the daily goal of taking in double the amount of money that it costs to rent the cab. When it rains, they meet their goal more rapidly, and head home sooner. New Yorkers are thus deprived of taxis during exactly the weather conditions in which they need them most, while drivers are deprived of additional income at exactly the time when it would be easiest to earn.
the law of unintended consequences, sometimes expressed using the phrase ‘you can never change only one thing’. In any even slightly complex system, it’s extremely hard to predict how altering one variable will affect the others. ‘When we try to pick out any thing by itself,’ the naturalist and philosopher John Muir observed, ‘we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.’
‘Causally minded’ people, to use Sarasvathy’s terminology, are those who select or are given a specific goal, and then choose from whatever means are available to make a plan for achieving it. Effectually minded people, on the other hand, examine what means and materials are at their disposal, then imagine what possible ends, or provisional next directions, those means might make possible.
the ‘principle of affordable loss’: don’t be guided by thoughts of how wonderful the rewards might be if you were spectacularly successful at any given next step. Instead – and there are distinct echoes, here, of the Stoic focus on the worst-case scenario – ask how big the loss would be if you failed. So long as it would be tolerable, that’s all you need to know. Take that next step, and see what happens.
‘The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning,’
Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 per cent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself – and there isn’t one.
We’re not only distressed by our thoughts; we imagine that we are those thoughts. The ego that results from this identification has a life of its own. It sustains itself through dissatisfaction – through the friction it creates against the present moment, by opposing itself to what’s happening, and by constantly projecting into the future, so that happiness is always some other time, never now.
Schemes and plans for making things better fuel our dissatisfaction with the only place where happiness can ever be found – the present.
Without noticing we’re doing it, we treat the future as intrinsically more valuable than the present. And yet the future never seems to arrive.
Inculcate high self-esteem in your children, claims Paul Hauck, a psychologist opposed to the concept of self-esteem, and you will be ‘teaching them arrogance, conceit and superiority’ – or alternatively, when their high self-esteem falters, ‘guilt, depression, [and] feelings of inferiority and insecurity’ instead. Better to drop the generalisations. Rate your individual acts as good or bad, if you like. Seek to perform as many good ones, and as few bad ones, as possible. But leave your self out of it.
There cannot be a ‘you’ without an ‘everything else’, and attempting to think about one in isolation from the other makes no sense.
a terrorist who had reconciled himself to suicide would always have the upper hand against people who were unwilling to die
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung, and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no-one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with your hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
when things fall apart, however painful the experience, it’s a good thing; the collapse of your apparent security represents a confrontation with life as it really is.
‘If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life,’ Watts writes, ‘I am wanting to be separate from life.’
feeling secure and really living life are, in some ultimate sense, opposites.
There is an openness and honesty in failure, a down-to-earth confrontation with reality that is lacking at the higher altitudes of success.
(There is a greater correlation between perfectionism and suicide, research suggests, than between feelings of hopelessness and suicide.)
‘Achievement solidifies us. Believing we are invincible, we want more and more.’ To see and feel things as they really are, ‘we have to crash.
Zen transmits its legacy from this deeper place. It is a different kind of failure: the Great Failure, a boundless surrender. Nothing to hold on to, and nothing to lose.’
the ‘argument of symmetry’. Why do you fear the eternal oblivion of death, he wonders, if you don’t look back with horror at the eternal oblivion before you were born – which, as far as you were concerned, was just as eternal, and just as much an oblivion?
‘The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the pre-natal abyss with much more calm than the one he is headed for.’
‘Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat’
‘A good traveller has no fixed plans,’ says the Chinese sage Lao Tzu, ‘and is not intent upon arriving.’
