Civilized Man Is the Prodigal Son

I keep thinking I am doing life wrong. Everyone else seems to have a plan or a direction. Meanwhile, I feel like I am wandering. Not lost, exactly. Just not where I thought I would be.

Alan Watts would say that feeling is not a mistake. It is the human condition. And he explains it in his 1940 book The Meaning of Happiness, chapter eight, where he unpacks the Prodigal Son parable as a map of human development. I have read a lot of psychology since then, but no one puts it quite like he does.

The Prodigal Son explained

Watts retells the parable. A man has two sons. The younger asks for his inheritance early, leaves home, wastes it on reckless living, and ends up feeding pigs. Hungry and humiliated, he decides to go home and beg to be a servant. But his father throws a party. The elder son resents it.

Civilized man is the prodigal. The primitive is the elder son who always stayed at home. He is unconsciously in harmony with nature, living more by instinct than intellect, without the civilized man’s acute self-consciousness.

A child has no psychological problems of its own. Nature and its parents manage its inner affairs partly. Not until the sense of self-consciousness is fully developed does it feel that sense of responsibility which arises when we become aware of our power to direct and control our own affairs.

But when man attains that state of self-consciousness, he becomes a prodigal. He feels isolated and lonely. In his low moments especially, he is certain that the universe is against him.

This hit me hard. That sense of the universe being against me? That is not a sign that something is broken. That is a sign that I have reached the stage of self-consciousness. I have left the unconscious harmony of childhood. I am in the far country. And the famine is coming.

The famine is here

In our own day, war and economic disorganization are the famine. There is no actual scarcity of wealth. Men starve only because of human stupidity.

But the famine is not just external. It is internal. The famine is the quiet realization that the things we thought would make us happy are not working. The promotion and the relationship you wanted. The apartment you bought. They were golden eggs. But the goose that laid them is tired. And we killed it trying to get more gold faster.

Watts writes that in time some people come to themselves, realizing they must return to nature and experience in full consciousness the harmony which the primitive has by unconscious instinct.

This is the return journey. But people rarely realize that the apparent departure from nature is an essential stage in man’s development. Without it we should remain like the elder son in the parable, jealous and unappreciative. Only those who have sinned can understand and appreciate the bliss of redemption.

Your restlessness is not evidence that you are failing. It is evidence that you are in the far country, and that is exactly where you are supposed to be at this stage.

The Hindus were right

The Hindus represent the evolution of man as a circle. Starting at the top, he falls, instinctively and unconsciously, to the bottom. At that point they say he enters the extreme of materiality and self-consciousness, the age of Kali Yuga. From there he must climb up the second half of the circle and so return in full consciousness to the point from which he began.

But truly to be united with nature again, he must first experience that absolute division between himself and the universe.

This is an important point. You cannot go back to nature by pretending you never left. You cannot reclaim the unconscious harmony of childhood. That door is closed. What you can do is climb the second half of the circle. You can return, but you return in full consciousness. You return with the knowledge and the suffering of the prodigal son. And that makes the return richer than the elder son could ever understand.

The elder son never left or suffered. He never learned. He is at home, but he does not know the value of home. The prodigal son suffered and wandered, then came back. He knows.

Civilization is not the enemy

Watts is not saying civilization is bad. He is saying that our struggle with it is part of a natural scheme of evolution, something we have grown into by instinct as the caterpillar grows into a chrysalis.

This matters because so many people beat themselves up for being unhappy in modern life. They think: “If I just got back to nature, I would be fine.” But Watts says that is not the answer. He would not have you give up your machines and cities and retire to the forests and live in wigwams. He would only have you change your attitude.

The penalties we pay for our isolation are only indirect on the physical plane. They originate in our mind and hit hardest there.

This connects to the map and territory confusion. The map is our mental model of reality. The territory is reality itself. When we suffer, we are usually suffering from a bad map, not from bad territory. We think the world is against us or that we should be further along. Everyone else seems to have it figured out. None of that is the territory. That is all map.

The return journey

So what does the return look like?

Watts says the first step is to understand that we have never actually been cut off from nature at all. That our present acute conflict with life is necessary, part of a natural purpose. Self-consciousness is not a denial but a fulfillment of natural law.

The second step is to accept that conflict. The ego can no more extract itself from it than a tooth can pull itself out of your jaw.

When you accept this, something shifts. The conflict stops being a sign that you are doing something wrong. It becomes a sign that you are in the process. You are in the far country. You are learning. And the return is already happening, whether you notice it or not.

I see this in my own life. I spent two years building a business that failed. I thought I was wasting my time. Eighteen-hour days, no salary, endless rejection. But that failure is what pushed me to sit down and actually read Watts, to question what I was doing and why. Without the famine, I would never have come to myself. The trial and error approach to growth is exactly this: the mistakes are not evidence of failure. They are the hunger that drives the return.

FAQ

Does this mean I should not try to improve my life? No. It means the improvement is not the enemy. The enemy is the resistance to the process of improvement. You can grow and change. Build things if you want. Just do not tie your sanity to the outcome.

What if I feel like I have been in the far country for too long? The prodigal son wasted his fortune. He hit bottom. But he came back. There is no time limit on the return. What matters is the coming-to-yourself moment. When it happens, you turn around.

Is there a difference between this and Stoicism? The Stoics would say that externals are not up to you. Watts would say that externals are not separate from you. The difference is subtle but real. Stoicism tells you to accept what you cannot control. Watts tells you that the control itself is an illusion. Both lead to peace. The path is different. The destination is similar.

How do I know if I am making progress? You will know because the resistance decreases. You will stop fighting the process and treating every setback as a catastrophe. The famine starts to feel necessary, and the wandering starts to feel educational. The return starts to feel inevitable.

You are not lost. You are in the far country. And that is exactly where you are supposed to be.