Health, money, relationships — the three things that keep most of us awake at night. Three teachers, separated by centuries, point toward the same quiet way through.
Ask almost anyone what they worry about most, and the answer will likely fall into one of three categories: their health, their finances, or their relationships. These are not shallow concerns — they sit at the foundation of how safe, connected, and viable we feel in the world. And yet, for all the modern advice available on each of them, the struggle remains. Perhaps because the problem is not a lack of information. Perhaps it is the way we relate to the struggle itself.
Three teachers — Alan Watts, Marcus Aurelius, and the Buddha — lived in very different times and very different circumstances. None of them had a savings account, a health insurance plan, or a relationship therapist on speed dial. And yet each arrived, through different paths, at insights about these three universal human struggles that remain as clear and usable today as the day they were first spoken.
Health
The Buddha’s first teaching was that life involves suffering — not as a punishment or a flaw, but as a structural feature of having a body that ages, gets sick, and eventually stops. The question he was concerned with was not how to prevent this, but how to stop adding unnecessary suffering on top of the inevitable kind. Physical discomfort is real. The layer of dread, resistance, and catastrophizing we build around it is often larger than the discomfort itself — and that layer is something we actually have some influence over.
Marcus Aurelius, who was chronically ill for much of his reign and wrote his private journals partly as a way of steadying himself through physical pain, kept returning to the same idea: the body’s condition is largely outside our control, but our response to it is not. He did not pretend the pain wasn’t there. He asked, plainly, whether the suffering he added on top of the physical reality — the worry about what it meant, the dread of what might follow — was necessary, or whether it was something he was generating himself and could choose to put down.
Watts approached it more lightly, but pointed at the same thing: much of our anxiety about health is anxiety about the future, which doesn’t exist yet. We are sick now, or we fear being sick someday, and either way the mind races ahead of the present moment. The body right now — this breath, this heartbeat — is simply what it is. It is the story we add about what that means for the next twenty years that creates the real anguish.
Finance
Marcus Aurelius could have lived in unlimited luxury as Emperor of Rome, and yet his journals barely mention wealth as something he wanted more of. What he returned to instead was the Stoic concept of preferred indifferents — money and material comfort are things that are reasonable to seek and useful to have, but they are not where your worth as a person lives, and they are not what will steady you when things get difficult. The man who needs wealth to feel secure is not actually secure — he has simply outsourced his peace of mind to a number in an account, and that number will always feel insufficient.
The Buddha taught something similar: craving — specifically, the belief that acquiring a certain thing will finally make us feel complete — is one of the primary causes of suffering. This isn’t an instruction to be poor. It’s a question about what we expect money to deliver. Financial security is practical and worth pursuing. But financial security as the thing that will finally make you feel safe and enough — that tends to be a moving target that retreats as fast as it’s approached.
Watts put it plainly in his characteristically playful way: most people spend their lives climbing a ladder, and only when they reach the top do they realize it was leaning against the wrong wall. The question he kept returning to was whether the thing being pursued was actually what you wanted, or whether it was what you had been taught to want by a system that benefits from your continued wanting.
Relationships
Of the three, relationships may be the area where all three teachers converge most clearly — and most gently. The Buddha taught that attachment, not love, is the source of relational suffering. Not that we should love less, but that we should hold the people we love with open hands rather than clenched ones — understanding that people change, that circumstances shift, that clinging to a person staying exactly as they are is asking for something no living human being can actually deliver. Open-handed love, paradoxically, tends to produce closer and more honest relationships than possessive love, because it leaves room for the other person to actually be themselves.
Marcus Aurelius, who dealt daily with betrayal, ingratitude, and political backstabbing on a scale most of us will never encounter, kept a simple discipline: do not expect people to be different from what they are, and do not make your own peace contingent on their behavior. He was not indifferent to others — his writings show a man who cared deeply. But he refused to hand the keys to his inner life to people whose behavior he could not control.
Watts observed that most relationship conflict comes from two people each trying to extract from the other something that can only come from within themselves — security, validation, a sense of being enough. Two people doing this to each other simultaneously is, he suggested, one of the most reliably exhausting games two human beings can play. The way through it isn’t to need the other person less, but to be more complete within yourself first — not as a withdrawal from the relationship, but as a gift to it.
What is striking about all three teachers, across all three areas, is that none of them offer a technique for getting more — more health, more money, more love. What they offer instead is a different relationship with the struggle itself. Not resignation, not indifference, but a clear-eyed willingness to tend to what can be tended, let go of what cannot, and stop mistaking the worry about life for life itself.
Try this: Pick just one of the three areas — health, finances, or relationships — where you are carrying the most worry right now. Write down which part of it is genuinely within your control, and which part is not. For one week, put your full effort into only the first list. Leave the second list alone, not because it doesn’t matter, but because worrying about it was never actually doing anything useful anyway.
