Do You Know When to Quit?
The hardest discernment and the questions worth asking before you go
« Nos vertus ne sont, le plus souvent, que des vices déguisés. » (Our virtues are, most often, only vices in disguise.) – La Rochefoucauld, Maximes (1678)
I know a woman who quit her job in publishing three years ago and now she tells the story at dinners with the reverence other people save for a pilgrimage, the resignation email she rewrote eleven times, the morning after when the light came into the kitchen differently, and a moral at the end that fits a little too well. I like her. But the moment she begins, I also develop a sudden and total interest in the bread. Because I have heard this genre often enough now that I could score it for strings.
Quitting has become our conversion narrative. It may be the last respectable religious experience available to the secular professional. You walk away from the thing that was hollowing you out, and somewhere between the notice period and the first freelance invoice you are reborn, and everyone at the table nods because they have all either done it or mean to, and the ones who haven’t go quiet, as though staying were proof of some deficiency, a shortage of nerve.
For a while the money ran the other way. Ten years ago, the shelves sagged under grit. Endure, persist, ten thousand hours, the marshmallow you were disciplined enough not to eat. Angela Duckworth handed us the word and the talk and the reassuring notion that character came down mostly to not stopping. Then the wind changed, as it does once a market has finished wringing out one story, and now there is a book by a former poker champion called, with beautiful flatness, “Quit”, and the same readers who once bought perseverance by the kilo are being sold the return journey, and on both occasions we were assured it was science.
I find this funny, which in my case means slightly bitterly and about ten seconds before I realise it applies to me.
Because neither the persistence people nor the walk-away people will put this on a slide. Their advice cancels down to the same uselessness. “Never give up” and “life’s too short” are one sentence, translated badly, twice, and neither one tells you the only thing you actually need, which is how to read the situation you are standing in. Whether the thing in front of you is a wall you should stop hitting, or a door whose handle you haven’t found or, most of the time, something with no clean shape at all. Whether what you feel is the honest ache of hard work or the more subtle thing underneath it, the slow leak, self leaving self while you are looking the other way.
That question is old. Much older than the productivity people who think they discovered the dilemma sometime around their second podcast.
The desert monks, who had nothing to quit except God and did it anyway sometimes, had a name for the thing that visits you at the flat middle of any long commitment. “Acedia”. The noonday demon. It does not come as despair; you would see despair coming and brace. But when it comes as reasonableness, a calm and rather intelligent voice pointing out that your cell is too small, your work beneath your gifts, your marriage a compromise you were too young to understand, your city provincial, and that your real life, your true one, is waiting somewhere you are not, then it is totally different. The demon never tells you to sin. It tells you that leaving would be growth. That going would be the mature and even the courageous act. Acedia is the one temptation that arrives wearing the robes of your own better judgement.
And this is exactly why the current mood worries me. We have built a whole commercial vocabulary that speaks in the voice of the noonday demon and calls it “wellness”. Listen to yourself! Honour your capacity! Protect your peace! Choose you! Some of that is wisdom. Some of it is the oldest spiritual sickness there is, relaunched by people with a newsletter and a course.
The easy cases make terrible teachers. My friend’s publishing job was an easy case. She was miserable, underpaid, managed by a man who said “circle back” without irony, and everyone could see it, which is why the story plays so well at dinner. It flatters the audience’s judgement as much as her own.
Nobody agonises over quitting something that was obviously finishing them off. We agonise over the good-enough. The marriage that is seventy per cent tender and thirty per cent lonely. The vocation you chose at nineteen and have half outgrown and half become. The city you love in September and cannot forgive in February. The faith that no longer explains anything and still, somehow, holds. Those are the ones that keep you up. And on those, the wellness voice and the grit voice are both worse than silence, because both are certain, and certainty is precisely the thing you do not have and should not pretend to.
I have quit well, once or twice. I have quit badly rather more often than that. And the thing nobody warns you about, the thing with no name and no confetti, I have also done, which is to stay badly, for years, on purpose, while calling it something nicer. Staying badly is invisible. From the outside it looks like loyalty. From the inside it feels like watching yourself leave a room very slowly over the course of several years. I did it once with something I will not name yet. I will, further down, because I promised you honesty and not just cleverness, and the two are not the same thing, whatever this platform’s incentives suggest.
So, if leaving can be a demon and staying can be a slow disappearance, and both appear as virtue, then you need something sturdier than a mood to decide by. You need questions. Real ones, questions you cannot answer with a feeling.
Here they are! I will not be handing you the sunk-cost question, the one everybody reaches for first, because it is a trap in the robes of wisdom, and I would rather show you why.