But the culture in which I and almost all whites were raised vainly imagines that hunger, sleeping, and excreting can be regimented. Amerindians have always mocked the palefaces for looking at clocks to know when they ought to be hungry. It is in the same clock-mad spirit that we are all supposed to “work” from nine to five on such preposterous projects as accounting for what we have done upon billions of square miles of paper derived from devastated forests, frittering away our time upon such dreary gambling games as playing the stock market or selling insurance in drab offices, turning out drillions of lines of chatter for people whose minds cannot be at peace unless perpetually agitated with information and misinformation, and manufacturing, selling, and advertising bizarre, noisome, and pestilential automotive contraptions for taking us all to and from these same projects at the same hours— thereby blocking the roads and jangling our nerves, presumably to give ourselves the message that we really exist and are really important.
Alan Watts, in his autobiography In My Own Way. So far, it’s an excellent portrait of the inner life of what the NYT calls “perhaps the greatest Western interpreter of Eastern thought in the modern world”. While probably one of his most banal thoughts throughout the book, he resonates particularly well with me and my thoughts on impending post-collegiate life when he goes on to say, “Therefore, at the age of twenty-one, I made to myself the solemn vow that I would never be an employee or put up with a “regular job”“.
