The Carrot

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.

Alan Watts called this a hoax:

“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.”

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.

When is the timing ever better?

Not unfulfilled. Not unhappy. Not alive. That’s the charge Watts makes — that we can move through entire decades, busy and optimistic, and miss the whole thing.

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.

The carrot was never the point. Neither was the ladder. We were.