The Joy of Quitting

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I’m a quitter. I like to call it a day while there’s still daylight remaining. When the going gets tough, I stand to the side so the tough can get going without me in the way. I jump ship. I bail out. I fail to commit. I stick things out only as long as they don’t get too, you know, sticky.

I’m not talking just about jobs, although I’ve done my share of job-quitting, occasionally in dramatic fashion. Several years ago, in the Brooklyn Half Marathon, the temperature and humidity were both high, I could feel them getting to me, and I didn’t like how I was performing. So, after not much more than eight miles, I quit. (Technically, I DNF’d—Did Not Finish.) Should I have fought through the remaining five miles, sweating and struggling and slowing down, just so I could say I finished? Why? I’ve finished tons of half marathons before, so what would that get me? Instead, I bailed out, walked over to the F train, and headed for home.

And then I did the exact same thing, at the exact same race, again this past May.

I’ve quit friendships. I’ve quit video games. I’ve quit so many books I can’t count them anymore, sometimes after 40 pages, sometimes after 100. I’ve left movies halfway through, and I’ve left them near the end. I long ago quit drinking milk, mostly inadvertently, and now I’m lactose intolerant, so I couldn’t go back if I wanted to¹. I’ve quit writing projects—my computer is littered with first chapters and nearly finished proposals that may never see the light of day. But that’s standard practice for writers, especially since we imagine we really will finish them all, maybe in a couple of years, if we find the time.

Quitting has an odd, schizophrenic place in American society today. On the one hand, we admire those who stick it out, who refuse to quit when everyone else is telling them to give up. The bottom-feeding business media just loves a tale of an entrepreneur who kept going through failure and calamity. Here’s Barbara Corcoran rehashing that old song-and-dance, for instance: “My favorite entrepreneurs on Shark Tank have had the same spirit, the same gumption, to keep going after what they believed in, even in the face of tremendous personal and professional obstacles.”

I get that, of course. We love these stories: the underdog who keeps on fighting, the true believer who knows they’re right, the genius who's too dumb to realize they should have given up long ago, the newsletter writer who floods his tiny audience with rambling word-tsunamis every day. Gumption is America’s original cryptocurrency. But we love them because they’re stories, with neat, heroic arc, and we love them because they are stories we can tell ourselves about ourselves, no matter how difficult or disappointing our lives get. We haven’t failed, we’re not just winging it—we’re destined for greatness! All we have to do is keep on keepin’ on, and we will get there.

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On the other hand, we all also collectively dream of quitting: Tell the boss exactly where he can stick it. Get the hell out of the city and move to an isolated cabin. Leap off the corporate ladder to guide rafting trips through the Grand Canyon or ski-bum the next couple of decades in Tahoe. Rip off the Band-Aid. DTMF.

This is a different type of fantasy, one that revolves around rejecting the very notion—the oppressive, restrictive notion—of success. Where the heroic success narrative puts its protagonist finally atop society, admired from within, this one leaves our hero divorced from society and admired from afar, a mirror-image icon for us toilers, tryers, and failers.

These two archetypes are not, however, all that different, because they’re both determined and decisive. They know what they want, and they’re willing to do what it takes to achieve it, even if “it” is misguided, ridiculous, or self-destructive. That’s what we love about them—that unwavering single-mindedness. That mentality stands out.

Most of my quits have been of this nature. I. Just. Stop. With the big things (jobs, relationships), there’s often no other way out than cold turkey, but I practice this with small things, too. If I feel like I’m overeating at dinner, for instance, I might just decide I’m done and the remainder will go to waste, and damn the voice in my head telling me to clean my plate. If, as I’m finishing up a run, I see myself nearing but not reaching another mile marker, do I jog up and down the block to round it out? Nope—that 0.05 mile is superfluous. I can stop right here, in front of my house. When I quit, I commit.

These are small exercises in quitting, but they help with the big ones, which typically require a lot of hemming and hawing before I reach the Popeye point of I can’t stands no more! That internal debate gets downplayed in the heroic quitting narrative, I think, or maybe it’s just always outplayed by the explosive epiphany of “take this job and shove it.”

But in reality, the hemming-and-hawing is a lot more common. Epiphanies are slow to arrive, and few of us truly want, or can handle, a dramatic exit, delicious as it may be to imagine. America loves waffles, hates wafflers. But this is the crux of it, the build-up that makes the decisive moment so cathartic—all that shit we were carrying, the agony we’re now flushing away, bored other people to hear, and bored us to describe, even as it dominated our thoughts. Without the backstory, the quit is meaningless. Still, can you keep the backstory brief?

The worst kind of quitting, the kind few admit to and no one valorizes, is quitting by default: that is, quitting by failing to try hard enough or to stick it out. This is when you actually want to succeed, you want to do well in that job, that relationship, that personal project, and yet, through a combination of laziness, distraction, and lack of ability, you just don’t. You withdraw, you flail, you groan—you give up. (Surrender is the most unpardonable American sin.) This is shameful, because you know there’s a decision buried in there, a decision you didn’t want to have to make, and that you chose, at some barely conscious level, to stop trying and to accept failure. It’s the flip side of the impulsive heroic quit, and no one’s proud of doing it.

This is the quit I have the most trouble with, and maybe the most familiarity: For every time I’ve said, “I’ve had enough,” in a race or a job or a piece of writing, there have been ten or twenty times I’ve wished I could push myself just a little bit harder, a little bit longer, and achieved what I most desired (or told myself I most desired). Or even if I don’t achieve, I could tell myself I did everything I possibly could, and if I still came up short, then so be it². I did my best. I lost, but at least I lost in Beast Mode. There’s heroism in that kind of failure, and absolutely none in petering out.

And so, let’s not let this essay peter out! Instead, I’ll heroically punch my virtual time card, hang up my hat, and send this motherfucker. It’s quittin’ time. 🪨🪨🪨

Notes

1. And I do sometimes want to! My last memory of drinking milk was at the Union Square Greenmarket on a summer’s day: My sister, Nell, and I had bought a pint of Ronnybrook Farm whole milk, and we chugged it down right then and there. God, that was good! Ice-cold and full of fat and flavor. Alas, never again.

2. I wrote last week about aiming for a B+/A- kind of life, but who hasn’t gotten an A- and wondered if an A was in their reach?

Read Yesterday’s Attempt