Alan Watts and the Backwards Law - Daily Wisdom #60

Welcome back to Daily Wisdom. Today, I'd like to talk with you about something Alan Watts called the Backwards Law, and about a pattern you have almost certainly run into without ever quite naming it. The fact that some things retreat from us precisely because we are reaching for them. I am Chen Li, author of the blog word of Taoism on Substack, and you're listening to my podcast. Think of trying not to think about something. There is a well known instruction that makes this vivid. Do not under any circumstances think of a white bear. The effort of suppression requires you to hold in mind the very thing you are suppressing, which means the harder you push it down, the more present it becomes. Anyone who has tried to stop replaying a conversation at midnight knows this from the inside. The same pattern runs through more serious places. Trying to be happy is a reliable way to feel the distance between where you are and where happiness supposedly is. So, the pursuit itself manufactures dissatisfaction. Trying to be confident makes you acutely aware of the confidence you lack. Trying to get someone to love you tends to produce exactly the neediness that pushes them away. Trying to force a child to eat turns dinner into a battlefield when nobody eats anything. And trying to be creative may be the cruelest of them. You sit down at the desk determined to produce something good and the determination itself narrows everything, tightens the throat of the work and the ideas that would have wandered in on an ordinary Tuesday stay away. Then, three days later, in the shower thinking about nothing, the thing arrives fully formed. Notice what all of these have in common. They are not tasks. They are states or their relationships or their conditions that emerge on their own when circumstances permit. And you cannot manufacture a state by will because the willing is itself a state and it is the wrong one. There is a useful distinction hiding here. Some things in life genuinely do yield to direct effort. If you want a wall build, you build it and more work makes it go faster. If you want to learn the vocabulary of a language, you study it and effort translates fairly directly into result. These are the domains where our ordinary intuition holds and it holds well enough that we come to trust it everywhere. But there is a second category and it obeys different rules. Sleep, arousal, spontaneity, ease, love, inspiration, grace, and a certain kind of grief that has to move at its own pace. In the second category, direct effort is not merely inefficient. It is actively counterproductive because the effort produces a state that is incompatible with the thing being sought. You cannot force yourself into effortlessness. You cannot will your way into surrender. The instrument is wrong for the job. Alan Watts gave this a name or at least popularized the idea in the English speaking world. He called it the backwards law and he put it roughly this way. That the desire for a more positive experience is itself a negative experience and that the acceptance of a negative experience is itself a positive experience. When you want very badly to feel good, the wanting is a form of feeling bad. When you stop demanding that you feel good, something eases and often the thing you wanted arrives through the back door. You left open. If you have felt this and thought it was some peculiarity of your own character, some special incompetence at relaxing or sleeping or being at ease, I would like to lift that from you now. It is not a flaw in you. It is a structural feature of a certain class of human experience and every person listening has run headlong into it. So what happens when we hit this wall? We do what we have always done which is to apply more of ourselves to the problem. The first response is simply to try harder. The sleep will not come so we deploy a stricter routine. The relaxation is not arriving so we book something restorative and approach it with real seriousness. The creative work is stuck so we sit at the desk longer and grip the pen tighter. In every case we take the failure as evidence that our effort was insufficient when it was the effort itself during the damage. The second response is more sophisticated and often worse. We try to try correctly. We read about the thing. We acquire a method, a protocol, an app, a technique with a name. There is nothing wrong with any of these in themselves. Some are genuinely useful, but notice what happens when someone with this problem takes up meditation. They begin to meditate in order to become calm. They monitor their calmness. They judge each session as good or bad. And within a fortnight they have built a small machine for generating self-criticism out of an activity whose entire point was to stop generating it. The technique got absorbed into the striving which is what striving does to techniques. The third response is to make the goal larger which raises the stakes and tightens the grip. If being liked at the dinner mattered, being liked becomes a project. If sleep is elusive, sleep becomes the sleep problem. I think we now think about during the day which guarantees we will bring it to bed with us at night. The more important we make it, the more we crush it. And the fourth is the one that catches the clever among us, which is to try to apply this very insight as a technique. You hear about the backwards law and you think, "I see, I will stop trying." And then it will come. But that is still trying with a longer route. You are performing not trying in order to get the result. Which means the wanting is exactly where it was, just wearing a costume. This is the most exquisite version of the trap. And if you have ever lain in bed thinking now, I shall let go of my desire to sleep. So that I may sleep, you know how quickly the mind closes that loop. Here is the impasse, then, and it is worth stating plainly. We have a problem caused by gripping. Our entire repertoire for solving problems consists of gripping harder, more precisely or more cleverly. And you cannot un-grip by gripping. Every tool we reach for is made of the very substance we are trying to be free of. This is where most people give up, and conclude either that they are uniquely bad at ease, or that the whole idea is a paradox with no practical exit. But there is an exit. It just does not look like the ones we are used to. What if effort is not one thing, to be applied in greater or lesser amounts, but two things, there is how much you are doing, and there is how tightly you are doing it. We have been treating these as the same quantity, and they are entirely separate. It is possible to do a great deal with a loose hand, and it is possible to do almost nothing with your whole body, clenched. And if that is true, then the way out was never to do less. It was to stop adding the tension, which was never producing anything in the first place. This is not a new discovery. It is in fact one of the oldest observations in Chinese thought. And it has a name. Wu Wei usually translated as non-action or better as action without forcing. The translation causes endless trouble because non-action sounds like doing nothing and that is precisely what it does not mean. Wu Wei is not idleness and the sages who wrote about it were not recommending that anyone lie down and let life happen to them. It describes a quality of action, acting in accordance with the situation, without the extra layer of straining, resisting and self-conscious effort that we usually pile on top. The toutaching approaches it from many angles and one of the playlists is the claim that the way does nothing and yet nothing is left undone. Read as a description of the world that sounds mystical. Read as a description of how a skilled person actually operates. It is almost a technical observation. Everything gets done and no forcing is visible. Consider what this looks like in someone genuinely good at something. Watch an experienced chef move around a kitchen during a rush. There is enormous activity and there is no visible strain. Nothing is rushed, nothing is wasted. The hand goes exactly where it needs to go. Now watch a beginner in the same kitchen. There is frantic motion, tension in the shoulders. The same task done with three times the muscular effort and a quarter of the result. Both are working hard. Only one is straining. There is a story of drunksies that puts this more sharply than anything I know and it is short enough to tell in full. An archer he says who is shooting for nothing for the sheer pleasure of it has all his skill available to him. He shoots beautifully, give him a brass buckle as a prize and he becomes a little nervous and shoots slightly less well. Now offer him a prize of gold and he goes blind or sees two targets or is out of his mind entirely. His skill has not changed. His need to win has changed and the need has begun to eat the skill. I find that story extraordinary because it names the mechanism precisely. The archer with nothing at stake is not less committed. He is shooting as well as he can shoot. What the gold introduces is not more effort but a different kind of effort. An effort mixed with wanting with fear of losing with self-observation and it is that at mixture not the shooting that ruins the shot. Trunksie's conclusion is that the prize divides the archer. Part of him is aiming and part of him is watching himself aim and calculating what it will mean if he misses and the part that is watching is stealing from the part that is shooting. It is worth asking where the surplus actually comes from because it is almost never laziness or bad habit. It comes from fear. The tension in the shoulders at the desk is fear that the work will not be good enough. The grip on the wheel in the first weeks of driving is fear of the crash. The archer's blindness is fear of losing the gold. Effort mixed with fear always overshoots because fear does not know how to calibrate. It only knows to give everything all the time in case. So a good deal of learning to work with a loose hand is really learning that the stakes are usually smaller than the body believes. But here is the part that matters most for us and where I want to be very careful because this is where the idea is most often ruined in the retelling. Wuwei is not an argument for doing less. It is an argument for removing what is surplus. The optimal level of effort is the least required to do what needs to be done. Notice that it does not say the least effort. It says the least required to do what needs to be done which may be a very great deal. If you're carrying a heavy thing up a flight of stairs the amount required is considerable and doing less would simply mean dropping it. The claim is about surplus. About the effort we add beyond what the task itself demands. And in most human activity the surplus is enormous. The second half of that wisdom would be the optimal type of effort is relaxed. This is the quality and it is separable from the quantity. You can live something heavy with a relaxed body breathing shoulders down. Force applied where force is needed and nowhere else. Or you can lift the same object with your jaw clenched and your neck rigid and your breath held. The load is identical. The cost to you is not. Almost all of us are the second person. Almost all of the time and not only with physical loads. There is a phrase from a very different tradition that says the same thing and I like it because it is so blunt. In the zen approach to archery the arrow is not released. It falls from the hand when the tension is complete. The archer does not decide the moment. The archer sets up the conditions correctly and the shot happens. So the model is not stop trying and hope. The model is do the work that is genuinely required. Drop everything else and let the result arrive on its own terms. The gardener does not manufacture tomato. The gardener waters weeds and provides light which is real work done properly and then the plant does the part the gardener could never do. There is an honest objection to raise here and it deserves a straight answer. Does this not risk becoming a sophisticated excuse for avoiding hard things? It could and for some people it does. The test is simple enough to apply to yourself. Are you dropping the tension or are you dropping the task? The gardener who waters and weeds and then lets the plant grow has done the work. The gardener who decides that watering is a form of forcing and sits inside has simply stopped gardening and given it a spiritual name. Who way has nothing to say in defense of the second one? And there is a consequence worth noticing one that runs against everything we assume. The relaxed approach usually produces more, not less. The chef who moves without strain gets through more covers than the frantic one. The writer who sits down without demanding brilliance writes more pages over a year than the one who waits for the perfect state and grips the pen when it comes. Ease is not the opposite of productivity. It is very often how the most productive people actually operate which is why their work can look effortless from outside and why that appearance is so misleading. So how do we bring this down to the ordinary places where you will meet it this week? The first and most useful move is simply to notice the surplus because it is almost always physical and therefore findable. You're working and your shoulders are somewhere up near your ears. You're writing and you're holding the pen as though it might escape. You're having a difficult conversation and your jaw is locked. None of that tension is contributing anything to the task. It is pure excess burned for nothing and the moment you notice it you can usually let some of it go without any loss in what you are actually doing. The second is to distinguish in any given situation which category you are in. Is this a wall to be built or is this sleep? Because the strategy is opposite. For the wall apply yourself directly and more effort helps. For sleep and for everything in its family. The only workable approach is to set up the conditions. and then genuinely stop reaching, which means being willing to not get it. Then watch what happens to your work when the stakes rise, because the archer's gold shows up in modern life constantly. The presentation matters, so you over-prepare and over-rehearse and arrive rigid. The date matters, so you plan it and perform it and are not really there. The interview matters, so you audition rather than talk. In each case, some of your attention has left the task and gone to watching yourself perform the task, and you can feel the split when it happens. Naming it in the moment tends to shrink it. I have gone to watching myself. Come back to the actual thing. Many of us have taken relaxation and made it into another arena of performance with metrics and optimal protocols and a nagging sense that we are doing it wrong. If your recovery has acquired a success condition, it has stopped being recovery. Rest that does not need to work is the only kind that does. We could put the whole of today into that. The things we want most urgently are frequently the things that only arrive when we are no longer standing over them. Demanding and the weight of them is not to want them less, which is not really in our power, but to do the actual work that is actually required with a loose grip and then to leave the outcome alone. Thank you for listening to today's episode. If it gave you something worth keeping, I'd be glad to hear which part landed and what you'd like us to sit with next. We'll be back at the end of the week with another episode of Life Wisdom. Until then, take care of yourself and see if you can put a few things down that you have been carrying more tightly than they needed to be carried. [MUSIC]