The Wisdom of Insecurity

A short book, subtitled A Message for an Age of Anxiety, arguing that the anxiety of modern life comes from the attempt to make life secure, and that this attempt defeats itself. Watts starts from the decline of traditional religious belief, which leaves people hungry for certainty in a world where everything changes. He argues that we try to secure ourselves by living in memory and anticipation, and so miss the only reality we have, the present moment. The deeper error is the sense of a separate "I" standing apart from experience and trying to control it. When we see that the thinker and the thought, the feeler and the feeling, are not two, the craving for security loosens. Watts distinguishes belief, which clings to fixed ideas, from faith, which is openness to the unknown. He draws on Christian mysticism, Vedanta and Zen Buddhism, but writes in plain modern terms with little technical vocabulary. Later chapters turn to morality and religion in this light.

It offers a clear, unusual diagnosis of anxiety and a case for living in the present, from one of the best-known Western interpreters of Asian thought.