The Backwards Law: Why Trying Harder Doesn't Always Get Us What We Want
The other day I was standing in my kitchen waiting for water to boil. It wasn't taking an unusual amount of time. The stove was working and the pot was doing exactly what pots do. But every few seconds I found myself glancing over at it as if my attention might somehow speed up the process. I laughed when I noticed it because I've done the same thing with elevators, browser tabs, text messages, and just about every uncertain period of my life. For someone who claims to understand that things take time, I spend a surprising amount of energy trying to negotiate with reality.
Maybe that's why an idea from Alan Watts has followed me around for years. In his book The Wisdom of Insecurity, he explores the law of reversed effort, sometimes called the backwards law. It's a name for something most of us have probably experienced without realizing it. The harder we try to achieve certain emotional states, the more elusive they seem to become. We want to feel confident but become increasingly aware of our insecurities. We want to be happy but find ourselves paying attention to all the reasons we aren't. Somehow, the effort to feel a particular way can become the very thing preventing us from experiencing it.
When I first encountered the idea, I thought it was an interesting philosophical observation. It seemed clever in the way certain ideas do when you're reading them from a comfortable distance. Over time, though, I started noticing how often it showed up in ordinary life. What interested me wasn't simply that people sometimes try too hard to be happy or confident. It was how easily we confuse working toward something with trying to control how achieving it will make us feel.
There's an important difference between the two. You can work hard to develop a skill and become genuinely better at it. You can prepare for an important conversation or spend years pursuing a goal that matters to you. Effort can improve your abilities and change your circumstances. What it can't necessarily do is guarantee the emotional reward you expect to receive afterward. You might accomplish everything you set out to do and still feel uncertain. You might reach a milestone you've been working toward for years and discover that your mind has already started wondering what comes next.
I think confidence is one of the clearest examples. For a long time, I treated it as something I needed to acquire before I could fully participate in my own life. Before speaking up or putting my work out into the world, I wanted some reassurance that I wouldn't embarrass myself. I paid close attention to every insecurity and looked for evidence that I was becoming the kind of person who no longer felt uncertain. The strange thing was that confidence never seemed to arrive through all that self-monitoring.
Looking back, the periods when I felt most comfortable with myself were rarely the ones when I was thinking about confidence at all. Usually, I was too absorbed in something else to notice. I was learning something new or working on a project that genuinely interested me. Sometimes I was simply enjoying a conversation without wondering how I came across. Confidence seemed less like something I achieved and more like a byproduct of forgetting to constantly evaluate myself.
There's also something slightly ridiculous about expecting ourselves to feel completely comfortable doing things we've never done before. We want the reassurance of experience without having to go through the awkward business of acquiring it. We convince ourselves that once we feel ready, we'll finally take the risk. But sometimes readiness develops through participation rather than arriving beforehand. And even then, confidence doesn't necessarily mean the absence of doubt.
Happiness presents a different version of the same problem. For a long time, I thought of it as something waiting for me on the other side of whatever goal I happened to be chasing. There was always a future version of myself who had everything a little more figured out. She seemed calmer and more settled. If I could just reach the next milestone, surely I'd begin to feel like her. Except the finish line had a habit of moving. I'd accomplish something I'd spent months working toward and enjoy the satisfaction for a little while. Then whatever I'd achieved would gradually become part of my everyday life.
The new job eventually becomes our regular job. The apartment we couldn't stop thinking about becomes the place where we do laundry and wonder what to make for dinner. Even our proudest achievements eventually become part of the lives we're accustomed to living. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But I wonder how often we ask accomplishments to settle questions they were never capable of answering. We don't just want the promotion. We want the confidence we imagine it will give us. We want proof that we're finally doing enough with our lives.
Sleep offers a particularly funny example of how effort can work against us. You can create the right conditions by making your bedroom comfortable and giving yourself enough time to rest. But anyone who has spent a night staring at the ceiling knows that demanding sleep rarely works. Suddenly you're calculating how many hours you have left before the alarm goes off, which is a wonderfully effective way to make yourself even less relaxed. The problem isn't that sleep doesn't matter. It's that some experiences don't respond particularly well to being ordered around.
Some of my favorite memories involve the opposite experience. They're ordinary moments that didn't come with any particular expectations, like sitting on a porch while a conversation wandered nowhere in particular or drinking coffee before anyone else was awake. Sometimes I was absorbed in something interesting and simply lost track of time. I remember those moments fondly, although I doubt I gave much thought to whether they were particularly memorable at the time. They were just ordinary parts of a day that I happened to enjoy.
Of course, there's an obvious complication to all of this. If trying too hard can make certain things more difficult, are we supposed to stop trying? Give up on our goals and wait for life to sort itself out? That doesn't make much sense to me either. Learning a language takes practice. Building a career requires work. Relationships need attention. Sometimes the discomfort we experience while pursuing something meaningful is simply part of doing something difficult, not evidence that we're approaching it the wrong way.
What I find more difficult is accepting the limits of what effort can accomplish. I can prepare for a conversation, but I can't guarantee I'll walk away feeling understood. I can put care into something I create, but I can't control how it will be received. Those are uncomfortable limits, particularly when something matters to me. And knowing intellectually that I can't control an outcome doesn't necessarily make me stop wishing I could.
It's easy to appreciate a philosophy about letting go when nothing particularly important is at stake. It's considerably harder when you're waiting for an answer or wondering whether all your effort will lead somewhere worthwhile.
I still catch myself checking the pot to see if the water is boiling yet. And despite understanding perfectly well that staring at it won't make anything happen faster, I occasionally find myself doing it anyway. Apparently, knowing the backwards law doesn't make me any better at waiting for water to boil.