While I can imagine sacrificing my happiness for an even greater purpose towards others, I can’t see a reason to sacrifice my happiness without some greater benefit. In the meantime he is feeling no physical pain; he has plenty to eat; he is surrounded by friends and human affection; he is doing work that is normally of great interest to him. In fact, it could be argued, that self-improvement is exactly the problem Watts’ argues against, trying to “improve” something which is illusory. Although this was not an original idea and can be found in many other philosophers works, there were a few chapters that offered a little insight.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Nothing wrong with that, really, but it’s certainly not on everybody’s list of go-to occupations anymore.While I can’t embrace many points of Watt’s argument—and I almost shelved the book a few times—my perseverance paid off in terms of having certain presumptions brought into the light for critical examination. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously.

And according to Watts, we don't even have the true past to draw upon, but a memory of the past which is really only part of the present. There are so many pithy statements in this book; every page seems to contain a phrase or sentence that just leaps out at you and I love Watts' distinction between faith and belief: 'belief clings while faith lets go. I recommend the book The Wisdom of Insecurity , but I think if you’re skeptical about these sorts of ideas, a better start is probably his television show, which starts more modestly and with fewer grand assumptions. Self-improvement implies a split of self, one of the past, negative view of the self (the mistakes I made, what I need to fix) and one of the future, idealistic self (an unrealistic ideal of the future self, that may or may not come to be).

Instead of a method, Watts argues that the problem can be resolved immediately the moment it is properly understood. My philosophical start to 2020 (an attempt to see clearly) continues with this, my first Watts book. Publication dates are subject to change (although this is an extremely uncommon occurrence overall). Our process of remembering the past and imagining the future can be so convincing that we often forget that they are occurring in our heads.

I have been taught by the very liberal community in which I have grown up to be skeptical of anything written by a white man in the 1950s and, in general, I think this skepticism is probably warranted. It is not as if he were thinking about it in a practical way, trying to decide whether he should have the operation or not, or making plans to take care of his family and his affairs if he should die.This insight is may seem like a technicality, until it is applied to some of the concepts we believe are central such as time and the self. The nature of reality and human existence doesn’t fit with this picture, or if it does, there is nothing we can do about it.