Why You Need to Take Life Less Seriously

Alan Watts had a theory about jogging. He thought it was the wrong way to run.

Not because of the health benefits or the mechanics. He thought it was wrong because of the attitude. Jogging is grim. It is determined. It moves in straight lines because straight lines are efficient, and efficiency is serious. The jogger lands on their heels and jars their spine and clenches their jaw because they are trying to get somewhere.

Watts preferred dancing.

The right way to run is by dancing. You should dance across the countryside, and anyone who does so will outwit and out-time the jogger.

He watched the Brazilian soccer team win the World Cup and saw something rare. They did not play like soldiers following orders. They moved like dancers. The London Times sportswriter said they danced their way to victory. They passed with subtlety. They bounced the ball off their backs, shoulders, hips, heads. It was beautiful.

We are not taught to do things like that. We are taught that life is serious, and therefore life must be done in an efficient way.

The curse of seriousness

Watts called seriousness the curse of Western civilization. He did not mean this as a casual insult. He meant it as a diagnosis.

Walk into a court of law and you will find strict etiquette. Do not laugh. Do not smile. The judge bangs the gavel if you break the mood. Stand when you are told to stand. Speak only when you are told to speak. The entire performance is designed to convince you that what happens here matters more than anything else.

It is the same at parades. The marines stand in straight lines with grim expressions. The flag passes by, and everyone is expected to feel solemn. Seriousness is not just a mood. It is a social requirement.

Watts saw this most clearly in church. Sunday was supposed to be the day to swing. The Bible says God worked for six days and rested on the seventh. It was a time-out from being rational and methodical and efficient. Instead, Watts wrote, the preacher says blah, blah, blah and lays down the law, law, law. He wears the same robe as a judge. He tells us what to do and tells God what to do. The hymns are religious nursery rhymes with dreadful tunes. Nobody dances. Nothing mysterious happens.

Sunday was supposed to be the day to swing. Instead, on Sunday we go to church, and the preacher says blah, blah, blah, and he lays down the law, law, law.

This is not an attack on religion. It is an observation about how we turned rest into another form of work. We made swinging into a project. We scheduled our joy.

Work is serious. Play is for Saturday.

Watts noticed something strange about how we divide our time. Work is supposed to be serious business. You get paid for it, so you are not supposed to enjoy it. If you enjoy your work, people suspect you are not really working.

Play is reserved for Saturday. Or Sunday, if you count the kind of play that involves sitting in pews. For many people, evening play means sitting in front of the television, passively consuming whatever is on. We are too tired from work to do anything else.

This separation is new. In older cultures, there was not such a sharp line between work and play. People sang while they worked. They moved while they labored. The activity had a rhythm, and the rhythm was enjoyable.

Watts told a story about a shoe shiner in a New York subway. The man sang while he worked. He gave an extraordinary performance. He was swinging.

Imagine a bank teller singing as they counted out your money. If that happened, you would probably complain to management. “This money is quite serious — no one should be singing about it!”

We have made seriousness a moral quality. If you are serious, you are responsible. If you are not serious, you are frivolous. But seriousness is often just rigidity wearing a suit.

The wiggly world

The world is wiggly. Look out of an airplane window and you will see clouds, mountains, hills, rivers. None of them are straight. None of them are perfect circles or squares. They wiggle.

Humans are obsessed with straight lines. We put grids on maps. We build streets in rectangles. We put everything in boxes. We classify and categorize and measure. Watts said this is our passion for Euclideanism. We want the world to be orderly and countable.

But wiggles are hard to control. They are slippery. You cannot count them easily. How do you count the wiggles in a cloud? If a wiggle has bumps, is each bump a subordinate wiggle? Once you start looking, wiggledom goes on forever.

People disapprove of wiggles because wiggles are difficult to control. They’re slippery. Also, you can’t exactly count them very well.

We are not wiggly. We are rigid. And rigidity is always in contrast with the fluidity that surrounds us. We are landlubbers in a world of waves.

Watts said this rigidity shows up in our bodies before it shows up in our minds. When we stare hard at something, the muscles around our eyes tense up. Our face tightens. We expend far more energy than necessary. That unnecessary strain is the physical basis of the ego. It is the feeling of holding yourself together, of maintaining your shape against the world.

That sensation of totally unnecessary strain that exists all the time is the ego — a physical referent of the idea of ego.

If you relax that strain, you stop resisting life. You start to swing.

Why we fear pleasure

Watts thought Westerners had a fear of pleasure. He saw it in how we eat, how we work, how we move.

We eat out of duty. We eat because food is nutritious, not because it tastes good. We swallow vitamins. We throw something down the hatch. The French eat with gusto. The British eat apologetically. We consider it slightly vulgar to enjoy food too much.

We fear that pleasure will beguile us. That it will turn us into addicts. That someone is watching and will punish us for enjoying ourselves too much. There is a feeling that we are not supposed to get too involved in pleasure.

This fear comes from our history. We lived through ages of scarcity. It was wicked to waste food. It was irresponsible to enjoy yourself when others were starving. Those attitudes stuck. Even now, in an economy of waste, we cannot fully receive the present moment.

Nothing is missing. There’s nothing missing at all — unless, of course, you’re absolutely starving or freezing, which most of us aren’t. When we are adequately fed and sheltered, there isn’t anything missing. It’s all there, only nobody is there to see it.

We are always looking for something else. Something more. Something in the future. But the future never arrives. There is only here. Only now.

What swinging actually means

Watts did not mean swinging as a form of escapism. He did not mean going crazy and staying there. He meant something more precise.

He meant that you must not take anything seriously. Not because nothing matters, but because taking things seriously makes you rigid. Rigidity prevents you from responding to the wiggly world.

Swinging is the opposite of clutching. When you clutch, you try to hold on. You try to make the moment stay. You try to control the outcome. When you swing, you move with the rhythm. You trust the flow.

Watts said if you do not go crazy at regular intervals, you will eventually go insane. By crazy he meant letting go. Laughing. Dancing. Playing. If you never release the tension, the tension becomes your identity.

This connects to the idea that you do not need to be fixed. You do not need to be fixed because you are not broken. You are a natural formation. A tree does not try to grow. It just grows. Given sunlight, water, and soil, it extends toward the sky without effort.

The same is true for human beings. Given the right conditions, we develop naturally. We learn. We heal. We mature. The problem is that we do not trust this process. We think we need to force it. So we add effort on top of natural development and create tension.

It also connects to the idea that life is a play, not a machine. Life is a play, not a machine. When you treat life like a machine, you try to fix it when it breaks. You optimize. You manage. But when you treat life like a play, you realize that difficulty is not a malfunction. It is part of the plot.

And it connects to the idea of playing rather than winning. Play, don’t win the game of life. Most of us are playing to win. We treat life as a series of objectives. But Watts pointed out that you cannot win a game that ends with death. The final score is the same for everyone. The question is whether you will play beautifully.

Practical ways to swing more

This is not about quitting your job and moving to a beach. It is about small shifts in how you move through the day.

Notice when you are jogging. Not just physically, but mentally. Are you moving in straight lines toward a goal? Are you clenching your jaw? Are you trying to get somewhere? Pause and ask if the straight line is the only way.

Let your body wiggle. When you walk, let your arms swing. When you sit, let your spine curve. When you speak, let your voice rise and fall. Rigidity starts in the body. If you loosen the body, the mind follows.

Do one thing without a goal. Take a walk with no destination. Cook a meal without a recipe. Talk to someone without an agenda. Notice how different it feels when there is no outcome to chase.

Sing while you work. Not for an audience. For yourself. Watts told the story of the shoe shiner in the subway. The man was not performing. He was enjoying. That is the difference.

Stop treating Sunday like a project. If you rest, rest fully. If you play, play without measuring. Do not turn your hobbies into another optimization challenge. Golf is only enjoyable if you stop counting the score.

Laugh at the seriousness. When you feel tense, imagine the situation as a scene in a play. The judge, the parade, the meeting, the deadline — they are all roles. You are playing a part. The part is allowed to be funny.

The bottom line

Watts said the first principle in the art of pleasure is swinging, which simply means that you must not take anything seriously. Life is a form of dancing, and dancing is not serious. That is why it is prohibited by fundamentalists of all types and other gloomy sorts. They do not approve of dancing. It is not because dancing is sexy. It is because dancing is frivolous and undignified.

But what is the virtue in being stiff and rigid? As Lao Tzu said, when people are born they are supple and tender. When they die they are stiff and hard. Plants are like this as well. The young ones are juicy and soft. The old ones are brittle and dry. Suppleness and softness are signs of life.

Rigidity and identity — being rigid and resistant to change, resistant to life — is almost useless.

You do not have to quit your job. You do not have to stop caring. You just have to remember that the way you move matters as much as the place you are going. The jogger arrives at the same destination as the dancer, but the dancer gets there alive.

The world is wiggly. It is waiting for you to wiggle back.