Letting Go of the Ground: Alan Watts' "The Wisdom of Insecurity"

Alan Watts had a gift for translating the insights of Eastern philosophy into language a restless Western mind could actually hear, and The Wisdom of Insecurity may be his most useful book. Its argument runs directly against everything our anxious culture believes. We spend our lives, Watts says, trying to make ourselves secure, to nail down the future, to protect ourselves against change and loss. And this very effort is the source of our misery, because security is an illusion. The only real life is the present moment, which is precisely the thing we are always too worried to actually live in.

Here is what Watts taught me about the impossibility of security, about the trap of living for the future, and about the strange relief of letting go of the ground.

Key takeaways

• The search for security is the source of insecurity; the harder we grasp, the more anxious we become.
• There is no fixed self to protect; we are a process, not a thing.
• Life exists only in the present; the past and future are thoughts, not places.
• To live fully is to accept impermanence, to move with change rather than against it.
• Letting go is not despair but a deeper kind of security, at home in uncertainty.

The thing we cannot have

Watts begins with a paradox. We long for security, for solid ground, for a guarantee that things will be all right. But everything that exists is in flux; nothing stays; even our own bodies and minds are changing every moment. To demand permanence from an impermanent world is to set ourselves up for endless frustration. Worse, the more desperately we grasp for security, the more insecure we feel, because grasping itself is an admission of fear. I recognised my own habits here instantly, the planning, the controlling, the constant low anxiety about the future. Watts gently points out that I am trying to hold water in a clenched fist.

There is no one to protect

The deeper move in the book is Watts’s claim that the very self we are trying so hard to secure does not exist as we imagine it. We picture a fixed “I” standing apart from experience, observing and defending itself. But look closely, he says, and there is no such separate thing, only the flow of experience itself, of which the “I” is a part, not a spectator. The thinker and the thought, the feeler and the feeling, are one. This sounds abstract, but its effect is freeing. If there is no separate fortress-self that must be defended against life, then much of our anxiety is defending something that was never there.

The only moment there is

Watts keeps returning us to the present, the one place life actually happens. The past exists only as memory, a present thought; the future only as anticipation, another present thought. We are never anywhere but now, and yet we spend the now worrying about a future that, when it arrives, we will also fail to inhabit because we will be worrying about the next one. To live for the future, Watts says, is to be perpetually out of touch with the only life we have. The cure is not to plan less but to stop mistaking our plans for living. When the future comes, it comes as a present, and the present is the only thing we ever really get.

What I’m taking with me

The Wisdom of Insecurity is short and quietly revolutionary. What I am taking from it is a reversal of my usual strategy. Instead of trying to defeat insecurity by becoming more secure, which never works, Watts invites me to make peace with insecurity itself, to accept that life is change, that there is no solid ground, and that this is not a catastrophe but the nature of things. There is a strange relief in stopping the impossible struggle. To let go of the ground, it turns out, is not to fall, but to discover that we were swimming all along.

Frequently asked questions

What is The Wisdom of Insecurity about?

It argues that our pursuit of security and permanence is the very thing that makes us anxious, and that real peace comes from accepting impermanence and living fully in the present moment.

What does Alan Watts mean by insecurity being wisdom?

That accepting the insecure, ever-changing nature of life, rather than fighting it, frees us from anxiety. The attempt to make ourselves permanently secure is both impossible and self-defeating.

Why does Watts emphasize the present moment?

Because life only ever happens now. The past and future exist only as thoughts, so living absorbed in them keeps us out of touch with the only reality we actually have.

References & further reading

1. Watts, Alan. The Wisdom of Insecurity. Pantheon, 1951.
2. Watts, Alan. The Way of Zen. Pantheon, 1957.
3. Watts, Alan. The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. Pantheon, 1966.