Alan Watts on escaping the rate race.
“In other words, you, as a disturbed mind, are trying to find peace of mind; your quest for peace of mind is the same thing as having a disturbed mind.
You work in order to make money to play. This is insane! Because you spend most of the time working. Then you come home with that and you’re supposed to play. Well, you’re pretty tired, to begin with, and we just don’t play. That’s all there is to it. You might play Saturday or something when there’s a day off. But in the evening very few people actually play; they sit and passively watch television. And they got all the money in the world.
The future is something you can not work for. For exactly the same reason that you can not work to be happy. Happiness, as it is always said, is a byproduct. And it will accrue to you becoming absorbed in something else altogether in some other quest altogether. A quest for vision, a quest for doing something, anything that may bring happiness.
And so in exactly the same way, the good future, the great society, the grand tomorrow is never going to be attained by working for it directly. When you’ve got that idea which is embodied just as much in the five-year plan as it is in the great society, of working for that thing. You will never make it. The only way you can get a good future is by a diversion from time altogether at right angles to the course of history. So what is important today is to create a diversion of such splendor that people will forget about the things they think are important. All their squabbles, all their ridiculous projects for destroying the planet in the name of progress.”
Written by Irina Le
Earthetics 