Quote of the day, from Alan Watts: “The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple.”
When I first read that, somewhere in my late twenties, I thought it was the most irritating thing I’d ever heard. Easy for him to say. I had a business to build, a name to make, a long mental list of milestones I needed to hit before I’d permit myself to feel like the day had counted. “Just be alive” sounded like the sort of thing you tell yourself when you’ve given up and want to feel deep about it.
I was, it turns out, completely wrong. But it took me roughly fifteen years and one very ordinary Tuesday to find that out.
The disease of the next thing
For most of my adult life I suffered from what I can only call the disease of the next thing. The present moment was never the point. It was always a stepping stone to a better moment that was coming soon, just up ahead, once I’d opened the second site, hit the revenue target, proved whatever it was I was so desperate to prove.
I ran my restaurants like a man being chased. Every good night was immediately recategorised as a baseline to beat. A full house on Saturday wasn’t joy, it was data, evidence I could push for a fuller house next Saturday. I was never once in the success. I was always standing slightly to the side of it, clipboard in hand, planning the bigger version.
And the cruel maths of that approach is that the finish line doesn’t exist. There is no target that, once hit, finally lets you exhale. You hit it, enjoy roughly forty seconds of relief, and then the goalposts politely relocate themselves to the horizon. You spend your one wild life perpetually forty seconds away from being satisfied.
The Tuesday that broke the spell
Here’s the moment Watts finally got through to me, and I warn you now, it’s almost insultingly mundane.
It was about a year after I’d sold up. I was sitting on a small balcony in Bangkok, early evening, the heat finally easing off. I had a coffee going cold beside me. One of my dogs was asleep on my foot, the dead weight of a creature with absolutely no concept of a five-year plan. The light was doing that thing it does here, going gold and then pink, and somewhere below a street vendor was setting up, the smell of charcoal drifting up.
And I noticed, with a kind of jolt, that I was happy. Not relieved. Not satisfied at a job done. Just plainly, stupidly happy, for no reason at all. Nothing had been achieved. No box had been ticked. There was no milestone anywhere in sight. I was simply a man on a balcony with a dog on his foot, being alive, and it was, against all my long-held beliefs, completely enough.
I actually laughed out loud, alone, because the joke had finally landed. I’d spent fifteen years chasing a feeling I assumed I’d have to earn through enormous achievement, and here it was, free, turning up unannounced over a cooling coffee, attached to nothing. It had been available the whole time. I’d just been too busy sprinting past it to sit down.
Why “just be alive” is so hard to actually do
The reason that quote sounds like a cop-out to ambitious people is that it offends our entire operating system. We’re trained, hard, to believe that worth is something you accumulate. That a life is a project to be completed, with deliverables. The idea that the value might be in the simple fact of being here, breathing, with no further justification required, feels almost offensively lazy.
But Watts wasn’t telling you to give up and do nothing. That’s the bit people miss. He was pointing at something sharper. He was saying that if the meaning of life is only ever located in some future arrival, then you have built a life you can never actually live, because the future is, by definition, a place you never get to stand. It’s always one more step ahead. You can chase the horizon your whole life and you will never once reach it, because the horizon is just the name we give to the place we aren’t.
To “be alive,” in his sense, is to stop treating this moment as the rehearsal for a better one that’s coming. There is no better one coming. There’s only ever this one, arriving and arriving and arriving, and most of us are too busy scanning the road ahead to notice it’s already here.
The science agrees, annoyingly
Modern psychology, which loves to put a serious face on what mystics figured out decades earlier, has a name for the thing Watts was describing. They call it savoring, the deliberate act of staying inside a good moment instead of letting your mind sprint off to the next task. Research on it consistently finds that the people who can actually dwell in their pleasant experiences, rather than rushing through them towards the next item, report being substantially happier over time.
The flip side has a name too. A famous Harvard study tracked people’s minds throughout their days and found that we spend nearly half our waking hours thinking about something other than what we’re doing, and that this mental time-travel, the constant leaping ahead and behind, makes us measurably less happy, regardless of what we’re leaping towards. A wandering mind, the researchers concluded, is an unhappy one.
Which is a very expensive, peer-reviewed way of saying: you were happiest on the balcony with the dog because, for once, your mind was actually on the balcony with the dog.
How to be alive on purpose
So what do you do with this, beyond nodding along and then returning to your endless to-do list? I’ve found a few things that help, and none of them require moving to a monastery.
I started catching the good moments in the act. When something pleasant is happening, a meal, a laugh, that gold-and-pink light, I now consciously stop and clock it. I literally think the words “this is one of them.” It feels daft for about a week and then it changes how the days feel, because you start banking experiences you’d previously have let slide past unnoticed.
I got suspicious of the word “when.” When I’ve hit the target, when things calm down, when I’ve made it, then I’ll relax, then I’ll enjoy it. That “when” is a con. It never arrives. I try to catch myself postponing my own life to a date that keeps moving, and drag a bit of the enjoyment back into the present, where it can actually be spent.
And I let the dog be my teacher, which is a humbling sentence to write. He has no goals. He has secured no funding. He is not building anything. He simply lies in the warm patch, fully and completely there, getting the entire point of existence right without any apparent effort, while I, the one with the opposable thumbs and the five-year plans, took nearly forty years to grasp it.
Watts was right, and it cost me a decade to admit it. The meaning of life isn’t waiting for you at the end of your ambitions, like a prize behind a final door. It’s here, plain and obvious and simple, in the unremarkable Tuesday you’re currently rushing through on your way to somewhere better. There is no somewhere better. Sit down. Notice the light. You’re alive, and as it turns out, that was the whole thing all along.
