The Backwards Law - The Art of Letting Go
Introduction - The Struggle
Most of us have a strong will - we want things, accomplishments, experiences, and it’s such an integral part of living that we demand it. We struggle to fulfil these desires, and we fight the fights we believe stand between us and what we want. We constantly pursue and chase these appetites to the point of complete physical, mental and spiritual exhaustion.
Sometimes we reach those goals, and we get what we want, and our hunger is quenched for a bit as we bite into the fruits of our labour. Other times, we endlessly chase and get nowhere; giving up is hard. Especially when you’ve poured your energy, time and perhaps money into it, and more than the resources we sink into these black holes, we’re also left with not getting what we want.
However, you might have found in your personal life that sometimes, as you feel like you’re on the brink of giving up, or maybe you do abandon those goals to pursue something else instead, then everything falls into place. That apple you were climbing for that seemed to jump a branch above every time you got closer, suddenly just falls into your lap as you sit down defeated on the ground. This is what the backwards law is about.
Popularised by Alan Watts with a simple preposition: the more we pursue something, the more it eludes us. The moment we give up and stop trying, what we were chasing - catches up to us. The backwards law, sometimes referred to as ‘the law of reversed effort’, is a philosophical concept which really boils down to the art of giving up and letting go.
We’re raised on the belief that only dead fish follow the stream and that you can achieve whatever you want by pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, and while there is some truth to this diligence, sometimes life isn’t testing us on how badly we want something, but our willingness to live without it.
The harsh reality is that whatever you accomplish and get will leave you feeling that hunger again, and you will want something new and something more. The ability to let go tempers our desires, and it provides us with a sense of gratitude, a sense which isn’t always available to the fiery mental state of someone on the hunt. Landing in ourselves and receiving what we were pursuing in this manner is a different kind of experience, and it shows the need for space, patience and that we need to learn to let go sometimes, and not cling too hard to these frivolous things.
The Curvatures Behind Effort & Reward
The backward law is built on the idea that our lives are often paradoxical and that there are profound metaphysical truths to be learned if these paradoxes are not necessarily understood but embraced and lived. The backwards law is not a scientifically backed concept, but it is a harrowingly true experience lived by many. Odds are you’ve encountered it yourself. Is there a moment you recall when you gave up on something or forgot about it, only to find yourself immersed in it later? Maybe you applied for a school, or gave up on the idea of finding love and soon found yourself in your dream course or with your better half.
We often assume the relationship between reward and effort is equal, and that the same amount we put in, we get back. If you work twice as hard, you produce twice the amount of results, and if you double down on anything, you will be twice as right. We assume that most of life exists on a linear curve. However, this mathematical formula isn’t true for a lot of things. Drinking two cups of coffee doesn’t necessarily make you twice as alert; it could make you an anxious wreck, and instead of increasing your focus, you become distracted by your hyper-alertness. If you shower twice, are you twice as clean as when you started?
In the second shower, you experience what’s called diminishing returns. The result (your cleanliness) isn’t as great of a difference as between the first and the second shower. These kinds of diminishing returns are especially apparent when it comes to things we enjoy. I recently wrote about dopamine stacking and delved deeper into how dopamine is a prime example of diminishing returns. The more we do something or indulge in it, the less pleasure we get from it. According to this curve, the more we do something, the less we get out of it.
But the backwards law follows a formula that is neither a static, linear curve nor a diminishing curve that decreases over time. The backwards law doesn’t dictate that pursuing happiness makes you happier in a linear curve over time, nor that your happiness decreases - it’s somewhat linear. It dictates that the less you pursue happiness, the happier you get.
Life is a complex thing which operates on so many dimensions and levels that we can’t use the same formulas for everything. Some activities can be traced and tracked by a linear curve; others are best understood by diminishing returns; and others act irrationally and paradoxically. But what use is this to us?
Understanding the backwards law and embracing it is really about developing the skill and ability to let go and to reap the benefits from it. There are many examples where this is useful, and as an artist, understanding this is paramount to the creative experience. Most artists know that the state of flow is found right between the paradoxical line of doing and not doing - the conscious split between actively engaging and being disengaged. It’s the art of letting go to get to where you want to be.
The Art of Letting Go
"When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float.’" - Alan Watts
When we try to create a state of mind, the desire for that state of mind creates a different and often opposite state of mind. Desire is very close to despair and comes from a place of lacking. This feeling that we’re lacking something is what drives us to achieve it. It’s our hunger which motivates us to eat, but we only feel it when we’re not or haven’t eaten. So take a state of mind like happiness, which is often emotionally synonymous with being content. Meaning we don’t want anything else, because we’re not lacking in anything. If we desire happiness, we don’t experience that feeling of being content; we experience the opposite - we feel the hunger and the things we lack.
If we, however, embrace the backwards law and find ourselves content with our perceived lack of happiness, we might fulfil some state of that happiness. If we try to find something positive in the negative, we can turn our setbacks and our losses into valuable and even positive things.
Summed up: desiring a positive experience itself is a negative one, and embracing a negative one is a positive experience. But there is a better example yet of the backwards law in action, and its usefulness. That is in the state of flow.
The state of flow is about letting go to get there. It can be found in engaging with any activity, but is perhaps best exemplified in creative endeavours. The flow state requires a fine balancing between engaging in work which is both easy and challenging. It needs to be mentally stimulating but not to the point where it’s too difficult, and it needs to be easy but not so much that it’s completely mindless. In this twilight zone between the two states of deep, active concentration and meditative mindlessness, there exists this state of flow. To get there, you have to let go to fully immerse yourself in the activity.
A great example is playing music. You have to be able to “feel” the music, because if you get caught up in the mental of keeping count of rhythms, or notes, etc., then you easily lose your rhythm and pacing. This is the embodiment of the backwards law: you have to stop thinking about how to play the music to truly play it. This applies for much more than just playing music - like if you get caught thinking too hard about what to write next, you don’t get any writing done, you need to get into that flow of consciousness, and that requires letting go and not entirely and actively writing.
It’s a very fine line, and it’s not always easy, but it can be practised. Understanding it perhaps isn’t necessary, but you have to embrace this paradox of life - because if you do, then the backwards law can help you achieve a lot of the things you might be struggling with, and it definitely seems irrational and counterintuitive - but it only asks one thing of you: to trust it and to let go.
Summary
The backwards law dictates that to achieve what you want, you might have to let go and stop pursuing it. Whatever it is you’re chasing only moves faster and will remain out of reach, no matter how close you get to catching it. The moment you stop pursuing, however, it comes to you.
This seems irrational and contrary to what we get taught; we often believe life to follow a linear curve, and we expect whatever we put in to yield the same amount of result. If we put in 1 effort towards happiness, we get 1 happiness. But many things follow a diminishing return, and the more we engage with something, the less we get, and still some things operate on a completely illogical curve - one where the less effort we put in, the more we get.
There are many examples in our lives where this is true: love, happiness, and the arts all seem to work on a similar principle. Can we love when we’re busy chasing it? Can the same be said for happiness? In the arts, we have a great example: that of the flow state.
A productive state of mind which really requires you to let go and not focus too much on the activity you’re doing. Finding a balance between being absent and being completely immersed allows you to just go with it. To feel the music, to write the book and to just go with the flow.
The backwards law, or the law of reversed effort, is a key principle in many Zen teachings, and its impact on our lives can be felt in many ways. As irrational and paradoxical as it is, it doesn’t need to be understood, but if embraced, then it can profoundly change your life.
