Daily Inspiration Quote by Alan Watts

Watts pulls a neat philosophical judo move here: the line sounds like a warning about gadgets, but it’s really an accusation about identity. Technology, in his frame, isn’t an alien force that “happens to” humanity; it’s an extension of the same unfolding that makes trees grow and stars burn. The destructiveness arrives when people imagine they’re separate operators standing outside nature, steering it like a machine. That illusion licenses carelessness. If you think you’re not part of what you act on, collateral damage reads as someone else’s problem.

The phrasing “one and the same process” is doing heavy lifting. Watts smuggles a non-dualist premise - drawn from Zen and Vedanta - into a sentence that looks like common-sense social critique. He’s also quietly flipping the usual moral story: it’s not that technology corrupts an innocent human nature, it’s that a fragmented sense of self corrupts what humans build. In that sense, the quote is less Luddite than diagnostic.

Context matters: Watts was writing and lecturing in the postwar boom, when industrial abundance and Cold War anxiety made “progress” feel both inevitable and ominous. His counterpoint to Western mastery culture is that control is a kind of trance. Wake up to interconnectedness and tech becomes less a weapon against the world and more a mode of participation in it, with consequences that finally feel personal because, in his view, they are.