The hard-bitten kind of person is always, as it were, a partial suicide; some of himself is already dead. If, then, we are to be fully human and full… - Alan Watts

Carried to its final extreme, the logical end of this type of reaction to life is suicide. The hard-bitten kind of person is always, as it were, a partial suicide; some of himself is already dead

If, then, we are to be fully human and fully alive and aware, it seems that we must be willing to suffer for our pleasures.

Science and psychotherapy have also done much already to liberate us from the prison of isolation from nature in which we were supposed to renounce Eros, despise the physical organism, and rest all our hopes in a supernatural world [...].
This liberation is, in other words, a very partial affair even for the small minority which has fully understood and accepted it. It leaves us still as strangers in the cosmos-without the judgment of God but without his love, without the terrors of Hell but without the hope of Heaven, without many of the physical agonies of pre-scientific times but without the sense that human life has any meaning.

We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them thatexcrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body. Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeed separate! Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game with self-contradictory rules.

In a civilization devoted to the strictly abstract and mathematical ideal of making the most money in the least time, the only sure method of success is to cheat the customer, to sell various kinds of nothingness in pretentious packages.