Alan Watts talks about how our society conditions children to live with constant frustration and worry about the future, and never learn how to live in the present. Society, A Perpetual Cycle by The Omega Point Project
We have an absolutely extraordinary attitude in our culture and in various other cultures, high civilizations, to the new member of human society. Instead of saying frankly to children, ‘How do you do, welcome to the human race, we are playing a game! And we are playing by the following rules, we want to tell you what the rules are so that you’ll know your way around, and when you understand what rules we are playing by, when you get older you may be able to invent better ones.
But instead of that, we still retain an attitude to the child that he is on probation, he is not really a human being, he is a candidate for humanity, and in just this way we have a whole system of preparation of the child for life, which always is preparation, and never actually gets there.
We condition the child in a way that sets the child a life problem which is insoluble, and therefore attended by constant frustration, and as a result of this problem being insoluble, it is perpetually postponed to the future. So that one is educated to live in the future and one is not ever educated to live today.
Now im not saying that let us drink today for tomorrow we die, and not make any plans. What i am saying is that making plans for the future is of use only to people who are capable of living completely in the present.
