“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 the 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! Another person says ‘Well I’d like to live an out-of-door’s life and ride horses.’ I said ‘You wanna teach in 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’ll 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 which you like doing then a long life spent in a miserable way. And after all, if you do really like what you are doing – it doesn’t really matter what it is – you can eventually become a master of it. It’s the only way of becoming the master of something, to be really with it. And then you will be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So don’t worry too much, somebody is interested in everything. 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 spending things you don’t like, doing things you don’t like and to teach our children to follow the same track. See, what we are doing is we are bringing up children and educating to live the same sort of lifes we are living. In order they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing. So it’s all retch and no vomit – it never gets there! And so therefore it’s so important to consider this question:

What do I desire?”

Alan Watts
Does It Matter?: Essays on Man’s Relation to Materiality
New York: Vintage, 1971

Does it Matter? is one of my favorite Alan Watts books, to which I have returned again and again. It is also an excellent introduction to Watts’ work. Thus I was delighted to discover that, at long last, it has been reprinted, hence this review.

The theme of Does it Matter? is material existence. The book begins with five long essays. “Wealth versus Money” deals with economics; “Murder in the Kitchen” deals with ecology and home design as well as cooking. (Both were originally published in Playboy.) “Clothes—On and Off,” “The Spirit of Violence and the Matter of Peace,” and “Psychedelics and Religious Experience” have self-explanatory titles.

Images of Gandhi’s hunger strikes, skeletal yogis in dirty dishrags, and onion-headed monks with begging bowls (not to mention the occasional kerosene and zippo self-immolation) have fostered the impression that Eastern philosophy and religion are entirely “spiritual” and world-denying. Similarly, images of the America’s sprawling cities, bustling superhighways, luxurious homes, and consumerist cornucopias have fostered the impression that our civilization is materialistic and this-worldly.

Watts argues, however, that in some respects the opposite is actually true.

Alan Watts
BORN: January 6, 1915, Chislehurst, England

“Underneath the superficial self, which pays attention to this and that, there is another self more really us than I. And the more you become aware of the unknown self — if you become aware of it — the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is. You are a function of this total galaxy, bounded by the Milky Way, and this galaxy is a function of all other galaxies. You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes. You look and look, and one day you are going to wake up and say, ‘Why, that’s me!’ And in knowing that, you know that you never die. You are the eternal thing that comes and goes, that appears — now as John Jones, now as Mary Smith, now as Betty Brown — and so it goes, forever and ever and ever.”