The Carrot

The Hotpot | By Lisanne

5.6

You’re seven, and your teacher says: work hard now, so you’re ready for the next grade.

You’re seventeen, and it’s: get good grades, so you get into a good college.

You’re twenty-two, and it’s: take this job, it’ll look good on your résumé.

You’re forty, and it’s: push through this quarter, retirement’s coming.

Nobody ever tells you when the “getting ready” part is supposed to end.

Alan Watts pointed this out fifty years ago:

“Let’s take education. What a hoax. As a child, you’re send to nursery school. And in nursery school you tell the child you are getting ready to go on to kindergarten. And then first grade is coming up, and second grade, and third grade. In high school, tell you everything ready for college. And in college you are getting ready to go out into the business world. People are like donkeys running after carrots that are hanging in front of their faces from sticks attached to their own colors. They are never here. They never get there. They are not alive.

You are gradually climbing the ladder towards, towards, going on towards progress. And then when it gets to end of grade school, you say ‘high school, now you’re really getting going.’ Wrong.”

Picture that donkey — head down, legs moving, carrot always exactly one step out of reach. It never occurs to the donkey that the stick is tied to its own collar. It’s chasing something it’s holding.

Watts is pointing at something most critiques of “the rat race” miss: this isn’t only being done to us. We’re doing it with our own hands.

Some preparation makes sense. A student cramming for tomorrow’s exam can still be genuinely absorbed in the material tonight. That’s not the donkey. The donkey is the one who finishes the chapter and immediately thinks: next.

I’ll rest when the project’s done, we say. I’ll be present when things calm down. I’ll start living when the timing is better.

But try to actually picture “better timing.” What does it look like? Most of us can’t answer that, because it isn’t a real moment — it’s just the next carrot.

Watts wasn’t saying we’re unhappy. Picture someone at their retirement party, smiling, cutting cake — and ask what they actually remember from the thirty years that got them there.

He was saying something harder: we can be busy, capable, proud of what we’re building — and still not be there for any of it.

The question isn’t whether the carrot is real.

It’s whether we’re willing to stop running long enough to notice we’re the ones holding the stick.

Somehow we have been in preparation mode since we were five years old. And nobody ever told us when it was supposed to end. Nobody told us life was a dress rehearsal. And yet, somehow, we all showed up to rehearsal. Think about how much of your life has been framed as preparation. School was for college. College was for the job. The job was for the career. The career was for… retirement? A point in the future where we’d finally be allowed to just be? Alan Watts called this out with uncomfortable precision. He found this idea a strange and unnatural progression of our early lives, and something indicative of a much deeper-seated issue in how we view the nature of change and reality. Watts says what I love about this quote is how he connects this sense for always looking for the future to quite never been alive. You have to show up and value what you’re doing for itself in order to be here in your finite life: We’re donkeys chasing carrots on sticks attached to our own collars. The carrot moves when we move. That’s the design. The strange part isn’t that we fell for it. The strange part is that nobody ever pointed at the system and said: this is the system. It was just called life. And it doesn’t stop at graduation. We do it to ourselves now, voluntarily. I’ll rest when the project’s done. I’ll be present when things settle down. I’ll start living when the timing is better. When is the timing ever better? There’s something Watts said that I keep returning to: they are not alive. Not unhappy. Not unfulfilled. Not alive. That’s the charge. That we can move through decades — busy, productive, optimistic decades — and miss the whole thing. The discomfort isn’t in the idea. It’s in the recognition. We know this. We’ve always kind of known this. The question isn’t whether the carrot is real. It’s whether we’re willing to stop running long enough to notice we’re the ones holding the stick.The strange part isn’t that we fell for it. It’s that nobody ever pointed at the system and said: this is the system. It was just called life. And it doesn’t stop at graduation. We do it to ourselves now. I’ll rest when the project’s done. I’ll be present when things settle. I’ll start living when the timing’s better. I catch myself doing this constantly. Treating now as a bridge to something more real. But there is no more real. There’s only how much of this — this conversation, this work, this ordinary Wednesday — we actually show up for.