Alan Watts was an English philosopher and writer who played a large part in popularising Zen Buddhism in the West. He gained a wide following after moving to the United States where he published numerous books on Zen and Eastern philosophy.
He is well known for his inquisitive nature and ability to cut through the bullshit of conventional thought to get to the meat of an issue.
In this comic strip penned by Zen Pencils, Watts delves deep into the eternal question:
What do you desire?
The answer may be more simple than you possibly imagined.
Steve Cutts presents a short hand-drawn animation on how a lame job can consume your life.
In a bearable but uninspiring job, the days slip by so freely that suddenly you wake up to find a decade has gotten behind you and you’re nowhere closer to anything you love.
With the exception of what simple pleasures you can cram in on weekends and evenings, it isn’t life, it’s a slow death.
There is too much up for grabs for the intelligent and passionate individual to pass the years that way. – David Cain, What Passion Will Buy You
In this lecture, Alan Watts expertly expresses eastern philosophiesthat look deeper into the question of what we all want.
We are in a game where we need to earn money for food and shelter, but what if that wasn’t the rule of the game? What if we lived in a society where money didn’t exist, what would get you up in the morning?
Alan Watts – What If Money Were No Object, Speech Transcript
What do you desire?
What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like?
Let’s suppose – I do this often in vocational guidance of students. They come to me and say, “Well, uh, we’re getting out of college, and we haven’t the faintest idea of what we want to do.”
So I always ask the question, “What would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?”
Well, it’s so amazing. As a result of our kind of educational system, crowds of students say, “Well, we’d like to be painters, we’d like to be poets, we’d like to be writers. But as everybody knows you can’t earn any money that way.”
Or another person says, “I’d like to live an out-of-doors life and ride horses.”
I said, “Do you want to teach at a riding school? Let’s go through with it. What do you want to do?”
When we finally got down to something which the individual says he really wants to do. I will say to him, “you do that, and forget the money.
Because if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You will be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing. Which is STUPID!
Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.
And after all, if you do really like what your’e doing, it doesn’t matter what it is, you can eventually become a master of it. It’s the only way to become a master of something, to be really with it. And then you’ll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is.
So don’t worry too much. Somebody’s interested in everything. And anything you can be interested in, you’ll find others who are.
But it’s absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don’t like in order to go on doing things you don’t like and to teach your children to follow in the same track. See, what we’re doing is we’re bringing up children, and educating them to live the same sort of lives we’re living in order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing. It’s all wretch and no vomit. It never gets there!
And so therefore it’s so important to consider this question. “What do I desire?”
