Alan Watts and the Hedonist’s Dilemma: How We Keep Justifying Our Pleasures
Wednesday, October 29, 2025.
Alan Watts taught millions how to let go.
He made surrender sound divine — a smooth, amber current of acceptance running beneath the static of modern striving.
But behind the microphone and the incense, the man who spoke of freedom was drinking himself into oblivion.
By the time he died at age 58 in 1973, Watts was reportedly consuming a bottle of vodka a day and chain-smoking through the California fog.
According to his daughter, he had been hospitalized more than once for delirium tremens.
The paradox isn’t that he failed to live his philosophy; it’s that he used philosophy to survive his failure.
Every generation invents a language to forgive its own excesses.
Watts called it the Tao. Nowadays we call it “Wellness.”
The Self-Exonerating Mind
Addiction rarely silences intellect — it usually simply recruits it.
Therapists call this motivated reasoning (Kunda, 1990): the unconscious process by which people adjust beliefs to protect self-esteem. Watts didn’t so much deceive himself as build a cosmology large enough to warehouse his contradictions.
His genius was translation — rendering Eastern paradoxes in the idiom of Western experience. But translation can slip into transference. The same brilliance that made him a gateway to Taoism also allowed him to craft a theology of indulgent self-forgiveness.
Philosophy is how clever minds explain their cravings.
Misreading the Tao: From Emptiness to Intoxication
At Esalen, the Pacific hissed below the cliffs while Watts lectured barefoot, wine glass perpetually in hand. The students heard liberation. The sea heard drowning.
At the heart of Taoism lies restraint:
“He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.” — Tao Te Ching, ch. 33
Watts inverted this quietly.
He cast wu wei — effortless action — as permission to follow impulse.
Where Lao Tzu’s “weakening of ambition” meant humility, Watts’ version leaned toward hedonism: spontaneous participation in life’s pleasures, even destructive ones.
In that reinterpretation, the Tao became not discipline but détente. Drinking was no longer an escape from the Way; it was the Way.
Addiction researchers Miller and Rollnick (2013) call this cognitive consonance restoration — the elegant story we tell ourselves so the bottle and the belief can coexist without friction.
Addiction as a Pseudo-Tao
There is a Tao-like quality to addiction: it dissolves worldly ambition, quiets ego, slows the frantic pursuit of status.
But it achieves this harmony through dissolution rather than cultivation.
The Taoist sage empties desire by awareness; the addict empties it by depletion.
Neuroscience shows why the calm never lasts.
Alcohol briefly floods the brain’s reward system, then punishes it with deficit (Koob & Le Moal, 2008).
What feels like balance is biochemical whiplash — serenity on loan with compound interest.
Philosophy is how clever minds explain their cravings.
Rascality and the Romance of the Flawed Sage
Watts called himself “a genuine rascal.”
The phrase worked: it let admirers forgive him his appetites and let him forgive himself.
Modern culture still worships this archetype — the flawed sage, the enlightened libertine. It comforts us to posit that wisdom doesn’t always require purity.
Existential theorist Ernest Becker (1973) saw this impulse as terror management: we make peace with mortality by glorifying our flaws.
Watts’ “full humanness” — both angel and drunk — was a way of looking death in the eye and calling it communion.
But the body keeps the receipts.
Chronic alcohol use erodes the same GABAergic calm the Tao celebrates, leaving anxiety louder, not quieter.
The monk and the drunk seek silence; but only one truly hears it.
Alan Watts and the Psychology of His Addiction
At the Esalen Institute in the late 1960s, Watts gave a lecture on “the joyous cosmology” — a glass of wine in hand — arguing that intoxication revealed the playfulness of the universe. His charisma made the claim sound plausible. Yet by then his liver was failing, and friends noted that his insights grew more circular, and his laughter was thinner.
Philosophically, he had turned the bottle into a sacrament of non-judgment.
Psychologically, it was the same bargain every dependent person strikes: “If I can call this enlightenment, it can’t be despair.”
From Vodka to Dopamine: Hedonism in the Age of the Feed
Our century has traded bottles for notifications.
Where Watts’ generation sought oblivion in alcohol, we find it in the glow of a screen. The same neural pathways light up; the same rationalizations whisper.
Neuroscientist Anna Lembke (2021) calls this the pleasure-pain seesaw: each artificial high invites a correspondingly symmetrical low.
Tech philosopher James Williams (2018) calls it the attention economy of craving.
Psychologists Hanson & Hanson (2020) describe Limbic Capitalism — an economy designed to monetize the distraction of central nervous system pleasure.
If the algorithm is our bartender, then we’re the regulars who never leave the bar.
Watts would have recognized the trap instantly. He simply drank the analog version.
Hedonism, Buddhism, and the Modern Mind
Buddhism isn’t anti-pleasure; it’s anti-attachment.
The Buddha didn’t ban the banquet — he cautioned against mistaking the menu for the meal.
Watts blurred that line, and today’s “mindful indulgence” movement does the same: luxury retreats with mantras, wine tastings with wellness hashtags.
This is neon hedonism — spirituality in soft focus. It promises transcendence without abstinence, serenity without surrender.
The bottle has been replaced by branding, but the story — “I deserve this bliss” — remains.
Philosopher Simone Weil once warned that to abandon desire is not to indulge it but to refine it — a truth Watts both glimpsed and ultimately decided to dodge.
The Therapist’s View: Integration vs. Intoxication
If Alan Watts walked into my therapy office today, I wouldn’t moralize. I’d ask what he was trying to quiet.
Addiction often begins as emotional regulation — an attempt to manage the unmanageable. For a philosopher, or a trauma survivor for that matter, that elusive sense of the “unmanageable” is usually meaning itself.
Perhaps Watts wasn’t wrong that divinity includes the devil. He just glossed over the fact that integration isn’t the same as intoxication.
Sobriety, in its broadest sense, isn’t abstinence from substance; it’s intimacy with reality. Alan Watts wasn’t a fraud; but he was a man trying to turn his pain into a sort of relevant pedagogy for his times.
After the Rascal: What Survives
Despite his contradictions — or, perhaps, because of them — Watts left an indelible mark on Western thought.
His lectures remain an introduction to Eastern thought for millions. His flaw was not hypocrisy. However, like many, (my self included) he suffered an over-confidence in his own intellectual eloquence: he believed he could talk his chemistry into submission. Unfortunately, he believed his own bullshit..
Philosophy is how clever minds explain their cravings.
Whether we pour another drink, roll another number, or open another tab, the ache is the same: to be briefly released from ourselves.
And then, perhaps, when we feel as if we’ve achieved both silence and safety, we think that the sound of water against the rocks will suffice. It never does.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. Free Press.
Hanson, R., & Hanson, F. (2020). Neurodharma: New science, ancient wisdom, and seven practices of the highest happiness. Harmony Books.
Koob, G. F., & Le Moal, M. (2008). Addiction and the brain antireward system. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 29–53. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093548
Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 480–498. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.108.3.480
Le Guin, U. K. (1997). Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching — A book about the way and the power of the way. Shambhala.
Lembke, A. (2021). Dopamine nation: Finding balance in the age of indulgence. Dutton.
Miller, W. R., & Rollnick, S. (2013). Motivational interviewing: Helping people change (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.
Williams, J. (2018). Stand out of our light: Freedom and resistance in the attention economy. Cambridge University Press.