What is really at stake when we give up?

I've been reading On Giving Upby Adam Phillips, the British psychoanalyst and essayist. The book starts from a simple word, giving up, and arrives at a less comfortable question: why does continuing feel so natural, while stopping obliges us to offer explanations?

Someone who stays in a relationship, persists in a profession, or sees a project through to the end rarely has to justify why they didn't give up. Someone who abandons something almost always feels they owe reasons.

This asymmetry is the starting point. Perseverance carries a positive value before we even ask what we are persisting in, for what, and in whose service.

That reverses the question. Instead of asking only why someone wants to give up, it is worth asking why that person feels they need to continue.

Two different kinds of giving up

In On Giving Up, Phillips explores a distinction that English allows: giving something up, letting go of something, and giving up, surrendering, concluding that nothing more can be done. In Portuguese, the same word covers both cases.

Someone who says "I can't stand this job anymore, I want out" may be voicing a desire for change. They may be speaking of exhaustion, disappointment, fear, or an expectation that could never have been met. The sentence seems clear, but its meaning is not given in advance.

A bet on the future

Letting go of something is rarely just a matter of eliminating it. We leave a job hoping to find another way of living. We end a relationship hoping to put an end to suffering. In each case, we lose something in the present in the name of a possibility we don't yet know. And we know less than we think about what we hope to obtain in exchange.

On the other side, there are those who continue for a different reason: what has already been invested. The more years, money, and energy we put into something, the harder it seems to stop. This is where the past begins to command the future. Someone who has spent fifteen years in a career they no longer want doesn't ask "Do I want this?" but "How will I justify everything I've spent so far?"

We often continue because stopping would force us to acknowledge that something has changed. And what is at stake is not just a project or a relationship. It is an idea of ourselves: that of someone who doesn't give up, who finishes what they start, who keeps what they promised. That image guides us, but it can shift from a reference point into a demand.

A caveat of my own

Here a counterpoint is worth making, and it is not Phillips's. Asking "why do I need to continue?" presupposes some freedom to stop. Not everyone has it. For someone supporting a family or without financial reserves, persistence is often not vanity or an ideal of the self; it is concrete necessity. A reflection on giving up that ignores this risks being too comfortable.

This doesn't invalidate the question. It only needs to be asked in the knowledge that the room for choice varies greatly from person to person.

What psychoanalysis listens for

When someone says they want to give up, psychoanalysis does not try to decide whether the person should stay or leave. Nor does it classify giving up as courage, weakness, freedom, or flight. It listens for the place that word occupies in the story of the person saying it.

Some people leave precisely when something begins to matter. Some stay long after they've stopped wanting to, because leaving would be experienced as failure. Some threaten to go hoping someone will ask them to stay. In each case, "giving up" names something different.

Phillips does not replace the morality of perseverance with a morality of abandonment. He takes giving up out of the realm of ready-made answers: neither persisting is necessarily virtuous, nor is abandoning necessarily liberating.

The question becomes a different one: what do we do to ourselves when we give up, and what do we do to ourselves when we are unable to give up?

We can understand something important about a person by observing what they are able to let go of. It is also worth observing what they cannot let go of. And what they keep pursuing even when they no longer know why.

Giving up is not the opposite of desiring. It is one of the ways desire reveals itself.

Reference: Adam Phillips, On Giving Up. Hamish Hamilton, 2024