Does It Matter?

We treat our lives like a frantic game of musical chairs, desperately circling for a seat—a promotion, a relationship, a sense of inner peace—before the music stops. The core assumption is that the chairs are scarce and the game is mandatory. We believe the anxiety of the scramble is the price of admission to a settled, happy life. But what if the game itself is the illusion? What if the frantic search for a chair is the one thing preventing us from realizing the entire room is ours to sit in, stand in, or dance in as we please? This calls for a deeper kind of engagement. It suggests our most cherished goals—security, permanence, a solid sense of self—are sophisticated traps we build for our own consciousness. The very act of trying to nail down reality, to make it hold still and behave, is the source of the frantic feeling that it’s all slipping away.

The man who spent a lifetime exploring this paradox wasn't a laboratory scientist or a statistician, but a philosopher who saw the West wrestling with its own self-imposed anxieties. Alan Watts, a British thinker who became a key voice for Eastern philosophy in the mid-20th century, observed this frantic game with profound clarity. He noticed that the more his culture chased satisfaction through effort and control, the more agitated and dissatisfied it became. "Does It Matter?" was written as a collection of essays that serve as a playful, provocative invitation to simply stop playing the game. It emerged from his decades-long project of translating ancient Zen, Taoist, and Hindu insights into a language that could address the peculiar spiritual exhaustion of the modern Western mind—a mind convinced it must solve the problem of living, without ever stopping to question if life was a problem in the first place.

Module 1: The Symbol Seduction

We live in a world of symbols. Words, numbers, flags, money. These are the tools we use to navigate reality. But Alan Watts argues we've made a catastrophic error. We've forgotten they are just tools. We've started treating the symbols as if they are reality.

This leads to a profound disconnection. We mistake the map for the territory. Watts points to the semanticist Alfred Korzybski, who stressed this distinction. Think about it. The word "water" won't quench your thirst. A stock ticker showing a green number doesn't mean you feel wealthy or secure. Yet our lives are governed by these abstractions. We chase numbers on a screen. We pledge allegiance to a flag, a piece of cloth. Watts gives a biting example. Congress passes laws to protect the American flag from being burned. At the same time, policies are enacted that lead to the actual burning and polluting of the American land the flag represents. This is the core of the delusion. We protect the symbol while destroying the substance.

This confusion isn't just philosophical. It has devastating, practical consequences. The Great Depression was a crisis of symbols, not of resources. The factories were still there. The workers were ready. The raw materials existed. What disappeared? A symbol. Money. Watts compares it to a construction crew with all the lumber and tools, but the boss says they can't build because they've run out of "inches." It's absurd. Yet we organize our entire global economy around this absurdity.

So what's the first step to breaking free? It's simple, but not easy. You must cultivate direct, non-verbal awareness. Watts suggests that reality is fundamentally "unspeakable." Practically speaking, you can't explain the taste of a strawberry to someone who has never had one. You can’t describe the feeling of the sun on your skin with words alone. Saint Augustine famously said of time, "I know what it is, but when you ask me I don't." This captures the gap perfectly. We know things through direct experience that we can't fully articulate. The problem is, our culture devalues this direct knowing. It prioritizes verbal, analytical thought. The result? We live inside our own heads, thinking about thoughts, instead of engaging with the world.

Module 2: The Intelligence of the Body

We've been taught to revere the conscious mind. The thinking, planning, rational part of ourselves. We see it as the CEO in our head, directing the clumsy machinery of the body. Watts flips this completely on its head. He argues the "mind" as we know it—the stream of words and symbols in our head—is a rather low-grade form of intelligence. The real genius is the body.

Here's the thing. Your nervous system is an instrument of staggering complexity. Trust the intelligence of the whole organism, not just the conscious ego. Watts asks us to consider a trained organist. They might play four simultaneous rhythms with their hands and feet. An impressive feat of coordination. But your nervous system, right now, is coordinating thousands of variables without your conscious input. Your heart rate, your breathing, your digestion, the chemical balance of your blood. The conscious mind can't even begin to comprehend this complexity, let alone manage it. To identify "yourself" only with the chattering voice in your skull is to mistake the announcer for the entire orchestra.

This applies to skill and creativity. Watts points to Hindu music. It's learned through imitation and deep listening, not through rigid notation. This direct, sensory engagement produces moments of ecstasy that Western music, often bound by its own symbolic system, struggles to achieve. The brain’s intuitive, non-verbal capacity outstrips the linear rules of the mind.

But this split between mind and body has a dark side. When we see ourselves as a "ghost in the machine," a separate ego controlling a physical vehicle, it creates a state of internal war. The illusion of a separate self is the root of violence. We spend our lives trying to force our spontaneous, natural impulses to conform to our abstract ideas of who we should be. We chide ourselves. We repress our feelings. We try to "conquer" our nature.

And this internal conflict inevitably spills outward. Watts argues that the most ruthless wars are fought for abstract principles. For God, for Justice, for Freedom. We become so attached to our symbolic version of the good that we are willing to destroy real people and real places to enforce it. We destroy the village in order to "save" it. This is the logic of the ego, projected onto the world stage. It's the futile, violent attempt to make a messy, multidimensional reality fit into a neat, linear box.