The Surprising Benefits of Giving Up

This seems to be a correlation, not a causation. There are many studies that show Stress, Anxiety, and Depression are prevalent in people who are smarter than the average, due to factors such as heightened self-expectations, rumination on negative experiences, and awareness of negative aspects of the world.

People who are smarter are more driven, which is how they develop their cognitive abilities. Giving up doesn't cause less anxiety, these people have less anxiety because they don't have the faculty to be affected by it.

One should become aware of one’s deluded notion in which one thinks that ‘I belong to these objects of the world and my life depends upon them. I cannot live without them and they cannot exist without me, either.’ Then by profound enquiry, one contemplates ‘I do not belong to these objects, nor do these objects belong to me’. Thus abandoning the ego-sense through intense contemplation, one should playfully engage oneself in the actions that happen naturally, but with the heart and mind ever cool and tranquil. Such an abandonment of the ego-sense and the conditioning is known as the contemplative egolessness.

-- from "Vasistha's Yoga" translated by Swami Venkatesananda.

For example, if you find yourself in strong disagreement with the current leadership at your company, instead of having cataclysmic battles every day on Teams, you could simply hand in your resignation letter and walk away while the boat is still afloat. Keep your chin up and firmly depart with grace.

Short term, this looks exactly like giving up. Long term, it can surface the foundation of your arguments and force those higher up the chain (investors) to potentially come back to you and your arguments in the future (assuming you were actually right).

I'm living this one right now. It's surreal watching people who attempted to game of thrones me ~every day get perp walked. I wouldn't say I enjoy this because it would have been better if we had figured out a way to work together. It definitely wasn't a skill problem on anyone's part.

It is often best to use your opponent's momentum and energy against them. If the problem you are dealing with is other people, giving up is a reasonable default. If the problem is some challenging machine learning algorithm or other personal project I think you should be more cautious about walking away. This can turn into a bad habit.

The fewer chefs you have in the kitchen, the easier it is to assign blame and figure out what the real issues are. You can become part of that refining process if you have the contingencies to endure this job market.

We trained our mind to ignore and forget all animal instincts, body signals and wisdom acquired through ages.

Of course, ancient battle wisdom from the East tells you how to approach issues - saama, daana, bhedha, danda - that is - make friends, negotiate, divide and rule, use force. At any point, if things look infeasible, retreat and avoid. Pure common sense.

If I’d pushed a little harder, would it have finally broken through?

Figma, Airbnb, and the other freak successes only exist because they didn’t quit.

It’s obviously true that some people chase almost “fantasy-level” ambitions. But for most of us, the reason we keep going is that, somewhere in the background, we still believe our goals are possible, possible enough to justify the time, effort, and even psychological pain. If some external standard comes along and declares “this is impossible, you should give up,” that can reduce stress in the short term, but it may also plant a long-term regret that keeps growing with age.

Looking back on my own life, the goals I abandoned for internal reasons (“this no longer fits who I am / I don’t want to pay this price anymore”) are the ones I can live with. I learned from those failures and even feel a bit stronger because of them. The painful ones are the goals I dropped mainly because someone else convinced me they were impossible. Those still feel like open loops.

So maybe the more useful takeaway isn’t “giving up is good,” but: keep reassessing your goals realistically as you grow. If, after a sober look at your skills and constraints, you still feel a goal is worth the cost, then commit and try. At least when you’re old and sitting in a chair somewhere, you’ll be less haunted by “I never even gave it a shot.”

That’s not to knock ambition, but to frame it in the most practical terms. How will success actually and specifically benefit you?

Couldn't find anyone interested in publishing it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Distilled it down to 1. a 3-min song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDnpZJI7jKw 2. a 5-min talk https://youtu.be/U4ZnfCmTJMY?si=Ac_jVKnR-ARQilLu

> adjusting our goals in response to stress or challenges, rather than grinding on, is often “a more appropriate and beneficial response.”

It depends a lot on the goals. I give up often and quickly. One reason is ... lack of time. (And also lack of discipline, but lack of time is really one key reason I toss away many things these days. You live only once, at the least most of us.)

There is, however had, one interesting study from psychology. I forgot the name, but they showed tests with kids as to "if you eat this now, you won't get an additional reward, but if you won't eat it for an hour, you get more lateron". Now this was not the setup, I am just quoting this from memory. The adults left the room so only the kid was there and some sweets on the table.

It was quite convincingly shown that the kids with more discipline and will-power, aka who refused the sweets in order to get more reward lateron, were also more successful on average lateron. Or, at the least, avoided some problems such as drug addiction and what not. So I think the "benefits of giving up" has to be put in context. It depends on what and how you give up. I may not give up on A, but then I may not be able to do B, because of lack of time, lack of resources and so forth. So these are just trade-offs, but discipline and will-power are just about almost always really excellent traits to have or train for.

Our brain is aware of when we stop making progress towards a goal we care about. The feeling of frustration builds until it becomes so strong it essentially forces us to stop.

Then, to get rid of the emotion, we have to step back and reassess. And then either see if we should try a different approach to the problem, give up on the problem entirely, or triple-check that the same course of action is still worth pursuing and thus "re-energize" ourselves.

If we never felt frustrated, we'd keep attempting futile goals for so much longer. When you feel frustrated, the answer is never to just ignore the feeling and try to "power through". It's to step back and reassess at the first opportunity.

The paper's finding focuses on goal adjustment/flexibility being a functional response when encountering difficulty meeting a goal. Disengagement had correlations with impairment. Which probably tracks most people's life experience.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02312-4

| This interpretation aligns with our finding that dispositional flex- ibility, rather than more proximal disengagement or reengagement, more strongly predicts functioning. Notably, we observed a positive association between disengagement and impairment. Although this could reflect a ‘dark side’ of disengagement—where letting go of goals offers short-term relief but risks longer-term purposelessness and dysfunction11—this pattern was not evident in longitudinal or experi- mental studies. An alternative explanation is that the association is bidirectional, with impairment potentially prompting disengagement as a reactive strategy. Given these complexities, we advice caution in interpreting this finding and highlight the need for further research.

It is of course obvious that any hard goal requires effort and effort is linked with a lot of "bad things". The whole article can be reduced to this. Trying requires effort and effort is hard.

https://www.templeton.org/grant/nautilus-magazine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Templeton_Foundation

That is also what people who persist on the path of their goal do. And that's not giving up, as the title claims.

If I forget a word mid conversation, I spend a lot of time trying to remember it. I can google or ask the chat bot, but emotionally I want to get there it on my own.

I think that I’m addicted to the feeling I get when I find these things or solve a very difficult problem. After reading an earlier article about “aha” moments, I wonder if it’s the same circuit. Maybe there is also a natural predisposition for hunting in my brain, which is why food seems to help me get past these … moments.

Save your applause for the end of the road.

It was said speaking of art, but it could also apply to software projects :)

Seems everyone here is kinda missing the point. It looks to be less about giving up and more about engaging with new goals. You find X goal is too hard to achieve and give up but also decide to pursue Y goal that is more achievable (and still has some fulfillment to it).

I get that but doesn’t seem anything too radical… If I have impossible to achieve goals then I’d naturally be upset. Spending time on goals I feel I can accomplish is almost always going to be more fulfilling than doing ones that feel impossible.

The nautilus story uses one meta study and the New Scientist has many individual citations with some quotes from scientists.