The art of giving up

We give things up when we believe we can change; we give up when we believe we can't. But both are attempts to make adifferent future.

- Adam Phillips

IN THE ORDINARY WAY OF THINGS, WHEN PEOPLE SAY THAT THEY ARE GIVING UP, they are usually referring to something like smoking, or alcohol, or chocolate, or any of the other anaesthetic pleasures of everyday life; they are not, on the whole, talking about suicide (though people do tend to want to give up only their supposedly self-harming habits).

Giving up certain things may be good for us, and yet the idea of someone just giving up is never appealing. Like alcoholics who need everybody to drink, there tends to be a determined cultural consensus that life is, and has to be, worth living (if not, of course, actually sacred).

There are, to put it as simply as possible, what turn out to be good and bad sacrifices (and sacrifice creates the illusion - or reassures us - that we can choose our losses). There is the giving up that we can admire and aspire to, and the giving up that profoundly unsettles us. What, for example, does real hope or real despair require us to relinquish? What exactly do we imagine we are doing when we give something up? There is an essential and far-reaching ambiguity to this simple idea. We give things up when we believe we can change; we give up when we believe we can't.

All the new thinking, like all the old thinking, is about sacrifice, about what we should give up to get the lives we should want. For our health, for our planet, for our emotional and moral wellbeing we are asked to give up a great deal now. But alongside this orgy of improving selfsacrifices there is a despair and terror of just wanting to give up. A need to keep at bay the sense that life may not be worth the struggle, the struggle that religions and therapies and education, and entertainment, and commodities, are there to help us with. For more and more people now it seems that it is their hatred and their prejudice and their scapegoating that actually keeps them going.