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Does It Matter?
First published 1971 · 140 pages
A playful, mind-expanding invitation to stop eating the menu and start tasting the dinner of actual existence.
What it feels like
Reading this collection feels like sitting down for a long, illuminating conversation with a brilliantly subversive friend who wants to wake you up from a trance. The pace is steady and contemplative, giving you ample room to pause and let the paradigm-shifting ideas settle. Watts writes with a wry, playful tone, gently mocking the absurdity of a society that chases money instead of wealth and confuses symbols with reality. The mood is expansive yet deeply grounded, pulling you out of your anxious, overthinking mind and dropping you back into the tactile, sensory world of the present moment. It is a profoundly liberating experience, perfect for seekers and modern skeptics who are tired of the rat race and hungry for a more authentic, tangible way of living.
- Mood
- contemplative
- expansive
- grounded
- mind-expanding
- Tone
- wry
- conversational
- provocative
- playful
- insightful
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- the illusion of symbols · modern absurdity · connection to the physical world · mindfulness in daily life · the nature of reality
- The writing
- Accessible, witty, and conversational, relying on vivid, everyday analogies to demystify complex philosophical concepts.
- The arc
- Moves from a wry critique of modern alienation toward a liberating, grounded appreciation of the tangible present.
- Who it's for
- Overthinkers and spiritual seekers who feel exhausted by the modern rat race and crave a more grounded, tactile connection to reality.
Content notes
- existential themes
About the book
This is a series of essays representing philosopher Alan Watts's most recent thinking on the astonishing problems of man's relations to his material environment. The basic theme is that civilized man confuses symbol with reality, his ways of describing and measuring the world with the world itself, and thus puts himself into the absurd situation of preferring money to wealth and eating the menu instead of the dinner.
Here, a philosopher whose works have been mainly concerned with mysticism and Oriental philosophy gets down to the "nitty-gritty" problems of economics, technology, clothing, cooking, and housing.
Description from Open Library.
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