Essay from Adam Phillips has me ready to quit stuff:
“There are at least three salient meanings of giving up that recur in different forms, all of them at the heart of Kafka’s preoccupations: defeatedness and sacrifice, or failure and compromise, or weakness and realism. The ambiguity of the phrase ‘giving up’ in English is instructive: to give up is always to give something up; something or someone is sacrificed. And sacrifice, whatever else it is, is a sadistic pleasure. To put it another way, perhaps we should not underestimate the pleasures of giving up, however forbidden or shameful they may seem to be. No one writes in praise of giving up, any more than people write in celebration of shame. The question I want to broach is not why do we give up, but why don’t we? Why are we less interested in having given up than avoiding giving up?”
