Accepting Insecurity

The Wisdom of Insecurity is a philosophical book rather than a step manual, but a faithful working practice can be drawn from it:

1. See the contradiction honestly. Notice where you are bracing — chasing reassurance, the perfect plan, the guarantee that things will be okay. Recognise Watts’ point: the search for security in a changing world is what manufactures the anxiety. “The more you pursue [the secure pleasure], the more anxious you become.”
2. Stop trying to secure yourself. Deliberately set down, for now, the project of nailing the future down. This is the surrender move — you cease the inner effort to control the uncontrollable.
3. Accept impermanence as the ground. Instead of resisting change, consent to it. Watts: “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” Let yourself be a thing that flows from moment to moment rather than a fortress to be defended.
4. Drop fully into the present. “You can only ever experience what’s happening in this present moment.” Bring attention out of the imagined future (worry) and the past (regret) and into direct, immediate experience — the sensations, sounds, and feelings actually here now.
5. Integrate the “animal” and the “thinker.” Watts contrasts the calculating, future-projecting mind with the instinctive self that simply lives now. The practice is to let the thinking self serve, not dominate — “going with the flow from moment to moment” rather than constantly leaving the present to defend against it.
6. Carry it into ordinary life. This is less a sit than a standing orientation: each time you catch the grip for certainty, you relax it and return to what is actually happening. (Sourcing note: quoted phrases reflect The Wisdom of Insecurity and standard summaries of it, attributed; the steps are a faithful rendering, not a reproduction of the text.)

Alan Watts (1915–1973) wrote The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety in 1951, drawing Zen, Taoist, and Vedantic insight into plain Western language.

Its thesis — that grasping for a fixed, secure self is the root of anxiety, and that freedom lies in accepting impermanence — distils the Buddhist teaching on anicca (impermanence) and anatta (no fixed self) and the Taoist trust in the flow of the Way.

Watts presents it not as religion but as a reframe any anxious modern reader can use.

Buddhist anicca / equanimity — seeing all phenomena as impermanent and ceasing to cling.

• Taoist wu wei / “going with the flow” — non-forcing, moving with change rather than against it.
• Stoic acceptance — distinguishing what is and isn’t in our control, consenting to the rest.
• Hawkins’ / Levenson’s letting go — releasing the underlying want to control a feeling or outcome.,
• ACT (acceptance & commitment therapy) — dropping experiential avoidance; willingness to feel uncertainty rather than fight it.

Hearing it as “give up / do nothing.” Accepting insecurity is not fatalism or passivity; you still act, plan, and protect yourself — you just stop demanding a guarantee and stop bracing against change.

• Using “acceptance” to avoid real problems. Genuine danger calls for action, not a serene shrug. This is for the excess grip for certainty, not for ignoring a fixable threat.
• Treating it as a one-time insight. The grip for security returns constantly; the practice is to keep noticing and relaxing it, again and again.
• Forcing acceptance. “Trying hard to accept” is just another form of grasping. The move is to stop adding effort, not to add the effort of acceptance.