I started Alan Watts’ book The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety today. Something in the introduction written by Deepak Chopra really shook me:
For in postwar America, life was all about progress and the lure of tomorrow. Where were we headed? First to the moon and one day the stars. How much could we achieve? Everything. What would success bring us? Riches and contentment that could never be taken away. Watts was the gadfly who pricked us out of our sleep. Progress was a sham, he said, and dreaming about tomorrow was pure escapism from the pain we fear today. What is popularly called “the power of now” was being addressed fifty years before its time.
He talked about two opposing reactions to decay of belief:
relief in tossing the old shackles
worry that reason and sanity will give way to chaos
Belief has disappeared through careful doubt and examination.
Now, I want to try to explore this thesis from the lens of innovation funding + social and economic progress. Thoughts still quite rudimentary so I welcome any suggestions or critique.
Reading this, I realized: we haven't really abandoned belief at all. We’ve simply replaced old forms of faith with a new one - belief in progress itself. Our research institutions operate on what I call the “train schedule” model of progress, demanding detailed roadmaps and guaranteed outcomes before work begins. We’ve swapped faith in divine providence for faith in predictability and control. Our grant proposals are our prayers, peer review our priesthood.
The tension Watts identified between relief and worry plays out daily in our funding decisions. There’s relief in abandoning old, rigid funding models that stifled creativity. But there's also anxiety about embracing uncertainty – worry that without strict controls, we'll descend into chaos and waste resources.
Yet when I look at transformative breakthroughs like Katalin Karikó’s mRNA research or Craig Venter’s genome sequencing, I see a different pattern. Real innovation emerges not from careful planning but from the adjacent possible – that space of unexplored potential that exists just beyond our current knowledge. You can’t map it in advance. You can only discover it through deep engagement with present questions and challenges.
Watts’ insight about the “power of now” might be exactly what our funding institutions need. Instead of demanding predetermined outcomes, what if we funded researchers based on their depth of engagement with current questions?1 What if we evaluated not just predicted impacts, but the quality of a researcher’s presence with their work?
The deepest irony might be this: by loosening our obsessive grip on controlling future outcomes, we might actually enable more profound progress. The adjacent possible reveals itself not to those desperately searching for guaranteed results, but to those fully present with the questions at hand. Perhaps better scientific funding doesn’t need better prediction – it needs better presence.
Just as Watts identified the escapism in our relentless pursuit of tomorrow, we must recognize how our funding systems perpetuate this same pattern of belief. The path to real social and economic progress might require something heretical: abandoning our faith in predictable progress itself. Perhaps true innovation lies not in better planning, but in the courage to face the uncertainty of the present moment, free from the comfort of our modern beliefs.
yesterday i accidentally wrote that natalie portman is in black doves. i was wrong. it’s keira knightley. thanks manan for pointing it out!
3 more days remaining in 30 days of essays! cannot believe i did it without managing to miss a day. it’s been kind of nice to have this grounding practice at the end of my days, especially because everyday currently feels like groundhog day and this practice forces me to notice and pay attention to things i learn or want to write about
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Fun read! Reminded me of another similar essay I read which I thought might be relevant https://paulgraham.com/getideas.html