Alan Watts- Desire

It is a deeper question altogether, which is what do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like? Let's suppose I do this often in vocational guidance of students.

They come to me and say, well, we're getting out of college and we haven't the faintest idea what we want to do.

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 a 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 or another person says well I'd like to live an out-of-doors life and ride horses I said you want to 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 uh 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 what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way And after all, if you do really like what you're doing, it doesn't matter what it is, you can eventually turn it, you can eventually become a master of it.

It's the only way to become a master of something, to be really with it.

And then you'll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is.

So don't worry too much.

Somebody's interested in everything.

And 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 and doing things you don't like and to teach your children to follow in the same track.

See, what we're doing is we're bringing up children and educating them to live the same sort of lives we're living.

in order that 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 well when we answer that question in a naive way we figure out that we want to desire What we want is to control everything.

To create girls that don't grow old, apples that don't rot, clothes that never wear out, conveyances that get from one place to another instantly so we don't have to wait, power available to do anything that you could conceive and do it just instantly like that.

To get this funny technological omnipotence.

but if you take time out to think about that and really go into it with your full strength of imagination and find out whether that's where you want to be you will soon see that's not what you want because the moment you have a situation where you are really in control of things that is to say in which the future is almost completely predictable.

You will see, as I said last night, that a completely predictable future is already the past.

You've had it.

And that's not what you wanted.

You want a surprise.

And you don't know what that's going to be because obviously it wouldn't be a surprise if you did.

You want a pleasant surprise.

But like you say, what sort of a surprise would be pleasant? And you can't really answer that.

Because you know if there are to be such things as pleasant surprises, there must also be unpleasant surprises.

There must be rude shots.

So you're like somebody taking one of those wishing well boxes, tubs, you know, where you fish in and you bring out a package.

And you don't know whether you've got a dead rat in it or a new camera.