On Giving Up: Why persistence isn't always a virtue

Adam Phillips, Psychologist & Essayist, on when and how it can be good to give up.

Sometimes a sort of magic happens in an interview. When the speaker holds the room in a captivated trance. This conversation, which took place at the ‘How To Change Your Life’ festival in January, was one of those.

You can listen here to the full podcast. But what follows are some of my highlights - invaluable words of wisdom I think we could all benefit from.

The essays in the book show, Adam says, ‘an unwillingness to accept any tyrannical accounts of human nature. It’s about developing curiosity and giving people the courage of curiosity so they pursue the things they love and like, as opposed to complying.” And complying is something “we have grown up having to do. In school for instance we all studied things that we had no interest in.”

His wants us to inquire and to challenge entrenched ideas about who we should be, how we should live and what we should want.

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ONE: Rethinking EXCLUSION. What we gain from being left out.

Growing up is so much about what we should enjoy it’s hard to know what we actually do enjoy

Adam: We have all had experience of not being invited to the party. Well, you could spend the rest of your life trying to get into the party. Or you could use the experience in a very different way. First, you can think whether you really wanted to go. You may have never considered that. Do I actually want to do this? Second you might consider what you might be able to do now that you can’t do that? It creates a space.

This derives from something we’ve all had from childhood about our parents. They go to bed together every night and not with us. Whatever parents do together without the children, the children experience as a kind of exclusion. But we also know, as children, that we can have a lot of fun when parents are preoccupied with something else, or each other. So it’s about not assuming that if one’s left out, the project is to get back in.  It might be better to think, what do I actually want to be included in? What do I really want to do with my time? What do I actually enjoy? 

Furthermore: Who am I? Who do I want to be? What’s the life I want to get for myself

TWO: Rethinking Giving Up: A failure or a chance to succeed at something else?

Adam writes: “Giving up is usually thought of as a failure rather than as succeeding at something else. But it is worth wondering to whom we believe we have to justify ourselves when we are giving up or when we are determinedly not giving up”

This really resonated. Who is this familiar voice that persuades us we must persist at all costs? Who manages to makes us feel ashamed or that we are a failure if we do not.

The critical voice in yourself has a very impoverished vocabulary. It only has about three or four ideas about you, or me. … it’s actually like an attack on one's intelligence.

Adam: “It tends to be one of the freedoms of adulthood that you can choose who you want to be judged by and in doing so you can work out what kind of life it is that you want for oneself. There is a great deal of criticism around and a lot of of parenting, at its worst, is critical. This doesn’t mean good parenting is permissive but bad parenting is over restrictive. So people are very quickly going to have a cruel internal voice. When they are critical of themselves, people are often extremely cruel and unrelenting.

You’ll notice your critical voice has a very impoverished vocabulary. It only has about three or four ideas about you, or me. It can be useful, self correcting. But when it takes off, as it does for most at some point in their lives, it’s actually like an attack on one's intelligence. It’s as though one takes refuge in self criticism as opposed to thinking about what one needs to think about. It’s very gratifying punishing oneself. It doesn’t feel like that, but it is. 

Conversation should be the only game in town really!

It’s likely that the larger your vocabulary is, the larger your world is … which is why conversation is the best thing going. It should be the only game in town because in conversation, things get elaborated between people. And that seems to me where the action is

THREE: Rethinking LOSS

“It's as though we've all accepted that our lives are all about loss, either anticipating loss or managing it when it occurs. And we are often encouraged to believe that mourning may be the most profound thing we ever do. I don't want to suggest for one moment that people don't feel loss. But the vocabulary of loss can infiltrate every area of one's life. For example, one could think that ageing is the loss of youth. If it isn't the loss of youth, it may be simply change. It may be simply development. But if it's the loss of youth, then obviously, as I get older, I'm going to be mourning my youth. But you could think that's a total waste of time. Why bother to do that? Because loss, of course, is all about the past. And one of the things I'm interested is people's relationship to the future. In other words, what kind of future are you trying to make, by the way you use your past? If one gets caught up with, or addicted to loss and mourning, it's very easily a way of not living in the future. 

Sartre tells a story about a young married couple. Every morning they have breakfast together. Then the husband goes off to work. And the woman sits by the window all day crying. When he comes back, she perks up. Sartre says, well, the obvious interpretation of this is that she's suffering from a terrible separation anxiety. But actually, when her husband leaves in the morning, she's free. She can do whatever she wants. So in fact, she's frightened of her freedom.

FOUR: Rethinking ALIVENESS and how to feel alive.

“You could think, obviously, everybody in this room is alive, we're alive, we're talking to each other. But it may be worth wondering, what makes one feel alive. And it may be worth noticing the ways one has of deadening oneself and of deadening other people. 

The novel ‘The Wings of the Dove’ by Henry James is a story of a very rich American woman who is dying. She has various conversations in which she says to her friends she's worried she may not have lived. This idea that one might have had a life and not have lived is very poignant and powerful. So it seems to me worth considering what it would be like to feel that one had lived, looking back. To notice what is genuinely enlivening to you. Because there may be lots of things you like that are genuinely deadening. Of course, you can choose to be deadened, and don’t have to be alive. But it may be worth wondering and noticing. Asking yourself who the are people who make one feel more alive? And who the people who make one feel rather depleted, depressed or dispirited. And it matters.

You describe habits as deadening in the book. As a form of failure?

That’s not right as an absolute general statement? Clearly habits make things possible. I mean, rules are habits. You can't play football if you don't know the rules. So you have to habituate yourself to the rules. But I think we're all also aware of when we recruit habits to deaden ourselves. When we want to feel safe rather than excited. And we can feel so safe, that we feel actually dead. And that might be what somebody wants to anaesthetise themselves. But I think it's worth wondering what one feels are the habits that get one the life one wants, and which habits are effective ways of evading that?

If somebody was curious about their habits, and what they were using their habits to do to themselves, inquire, talk about it, think about it.

You can't live without habits, repetition is fundamental to life. But some habits are more deadening than others. And if you want to feel alive, you need to do something about that.”

Why Giving Up should be taught in Schools!

Tyrants are people who don't give up. I mean, Trump doesn't give up. Hitler didn't give up. Tragic heroes don't give up

We should teach children about the freedom not to continue with something when one no longer wants to do it. We're taught that persistence is a great virtue. Sometimes it is. Clearly, there are lots of things you can't learn if you don't persist. But a lot of time is wasted persisting with something one doesn't want to do. If one was to learn giving up, it would be something to do with learning about a) where in one's life it might be useful and what one's fears might be about giving up? Because tyrants are people who don't give up. Trump doesn't give up. Hitler didn't give up. Tragic heroes don't give up. Not giving up means not being able to revise your project, not being able to have a second thought. So instead of it being connoted as a failure. Instead of thinking we shouldn't be the kind of people who give up. It should be redescribed: there are  some things one should give up and some people one should give up on.

Is it a cultural thing? A British thing?

I don't know if it's British, but all these things must be cultural ideals. To grow up in a cultural world is to be given a lot of pictures of the kind of man or woman one should be. And that means being given a whole vocabulary of values of ideals - you must never give up. You really need to see this through? Well, I might actually give up learning to play the piano, because a) I don't enjoy and b) I can't do it. But I could devote an awful lot of time trying to do it. It’s about assuming that giving something or somebody up is in and of itself a failure.

It’s not!