Around fifteen years ago, an old college friend of mine had a close call in the mountains. He and a companion were on a ski trip when they decided to hike away from the top of the chairlift to find a cool, unofficial ski run they’d heard about. They seemed to be heading in the right direction, but soon got lost; when they tried turning back, they grew only more disoriented. They ended up wandering for hours in the snowy woods. They had their cell phones, and considered calling for help, but my friend had heard that a rescue might cost thousands of dollars, and hesitated; meanwhile, morning gave way to afternoon, and then late afternoon. Eventually, they looked at their phones, only to find that both had stopped working. They were in serious trouble—in fact, they were on the verge of catastrophe. Then my friend smelled a sweetness in the air. His companion smelled it, too. They followed the scent through the trees. It took them directly to a little shack, near the top of the chairlift, that specialized in waffles.

When should you give up? You certainly don’t want to give up too soon on finding your way out of the woods, and call the ski patrol unnecessarily. Similarly, you don’t want to give up on your dreams before they’re realized, or on your relationships because they’re sometimes troublesome; you want to be a reliable, determined, heroic individual—someone with grit, who follows through. But, also, persevering can be a grave mistake: sometimes, either actually or metaphorically, you need to admit that you’re lost and call for rescue. How much effort is enough? And when does continued effort become unwise?

In “Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts,” Oliver Burkeman, a journalist turned self-help writer, argues that we ought to give up a little more often, and more pervasively. Burkeman focusses not on risky alpine adventures but on ordinary life. Many people, he argues, refuse to give up: they are perfectionists who strive ceaselessly to get control of their lives as workers, parents, citizens, and friends. Unfortunately, Burkeman writes, experiencing life “as an endless series of things we must master, learn, or conquer” has the effect of turning it into “a dull, solitary, and often infuriating chore, something to be endured, in order to make it to a supposedly better time, which never quite seems to arrive.” As a counterbalance, Burkeman advocates “imperfectionism.” He invokes the British Zen master Houn Jiyu-Kennett, who, instead of lightening the burden she placed on her students, made it “so heavy that he or she would put it down.” Once her charges saw their situations as “totally irredeemable,” they gave themselves “permission to stop struggling.”

Burkeman isn’t saying that we should give up completely on our ambitions, hopes, plans, and so on. Instead, his idea is that acknowledging our limits will allow us to accomplish more of what matters to us while “enjoying life now.” In an early chapter, he writes that many of us aspire to command our lives as though we were the captain of a superyacht, controlling our route “from the plush-leather swivel chair on the serene and silent bridge.” Yet it’s more realistic to see each of us as occupying “a little one-person kayak,” tossed about by waves and “borne along on the river of time” toward death. What being in a kayak means, in practical terms, is that you should try less planning and more doing. Instead of setting out to become a master meditator—and buying the requisite books, candles, cushion, and app—you should simply try meditating for five minutes today, and see what happens. Along the same lines, you might aim to adopt “dailyish” habits, or pat yourself on the back for managing three hours of truly focussed work in a day.

Burkeman thinks that it’s possible to scale back at the highest level, too, by thinking differently about what you should be doing with your life as a whole. He tells a story about Carl Jung, who, as a teen-ager, suffered from fainting spells and couldn’t focus on his studies. One day, Jung overheard his father lamenting his son’s condition: the family didn’t have much money, his father said, and he worried about how his son would support himself. The boy felt a sudden clarity: it was obvious that he should devote himself to succeeding at school. This, Jung later wrote, was his “life task” at that time. Your life task, Burkeman explains, is what emerges at the intersection of your circumstances and your abilities. “Never mind what you want. What does life want?” he asks.

A life task is less exalted, and more grounded, than your “calling” or your “destiny.” You may dream of becoming a director or a C.E.O. But, “if you only have a hundred dollars in the bank, your life task won’t require the immediate purchase of thousands of dollars’ worth of moviemaking equipment,” Burkeman writes. “If you’re the single parent of three small children, it won’t involve working eighteen-hour days for a tech start-up.” Your life task, right now, might be smaller and more obvious—writing a song, raising a child, getting a new job, or continuing in the one you have. Think of the contribution you can make “in the place where you actually find yourself,” Burkeman suggests. He seems to have followed this general principle while writing his book: it comprises twenty-eight very short chapters, meant to be read in the course of twenty-eight days. Even if you can’t commit to reading the whole thing, you can paddle your way through a few pages at a time.

“Meditations for Mortals” provides useful answers to the questions of when and why you should give up: you should do it when your optimized, productivity-hacked life starts to feel constricting, deadening, or unrealistic, so that you can get more value out of your all-too-brief existence. In his book “On Giving Up,” the celebrated psychoanalyst Adam Phillips takes the “why” question a lot further. “Pragmatism or mourning,” he writes, are two aspects of the titular act. In giving something up, we can trade it away “in the service of an appealing or at least viable future”—as when we give up on one project to make room for another—or we can simply let it go, experiencing “a felt relinquishing of the past in the hope of more life emerging.” Phillips notes that Samuel Johnson, in his dictionary, offered numerous definitions of “to give up”: “to resign; to quit; to yield; to abandon; to deliver.” Abandoning doesn’t sound so good, but the other options are “strikingly unpunishing.” Each day, for instance, we give up on being awake in order to deliver ourselves to sleep. It’s no big deal.

In Phillips’s view, we have a bias against giving up; we associate it with failure, mortality, and even suicide, as though every act of relinquishment were a step away from life. “Heroes and heroines are people who don’t give up,” he writes. And yet tragic heroes are tragic precisely because they never give up; hell-bent on their purposes, they pursue them until they destroy themselves. During a conversation, we might be telling a story or making a point when the conversation drowns us out; this can be an infuriating experience. But our anguish, Phillips suggests, flows partly from the bizarre way we associate giving up with annihilation. We yearn to be dauntless, and dauntless people “are people who cannot interrupt themselves or be interrupted”:

They are people who have refused the benefits of giving up, or even of
hesitation, people for whom giving up feels like giving up everything.
Not being able to give up is not to be able to allow for loss, for
vulnerability; not to be able to allow for the passing of time, and
the revisions it brings.

It’s possible to feel that giving up is only noble, or only allowed, when you’re forced to do it. But we should accept, Phillips writes, that, although “giving up requires a sense of an ending,” it “may not involve a sense of completion.” When we give up drinking—for the winter, or for Lent, or forever—we can do so without a sense of being pushed into it; we don’t need to hit bottom. We might just want to change, or to act differently. When we give up on an unfinished novel, we could understand it as a moment of failure—or we could simply say that we’ve decided to turn the page. Is it time to leave New York? To close the restaurant? To break up the band? We can mourn these things without mourning ourselves. They’re what’s ending, not us.

Are Burkeman and Phillips correct? Should we, as a general matter, see giving up as a sign not of weakness but of imagination, acceptance, or wisdom? In my late twenties, I was in graduate school and in the middle of writing my thesis when the 2008 financial crisis destroyed the professorial job market. My adviser suggested that I find something else to do until the market recovered—a way of circling the runway until the storm cleared. Or, he added, I could just move on. “You’ve taught students, you’ve given talks, you’ve lived this life,” he said, gesturing around his book-lined office. “You don’t have to do the same thing forever.” It was a life-changing conversation: slowly, throughout the next few years, I gave up on being a professor and became a journalist. Even now, I think of his advice all the time. Recently, when my son outgrew a certain way in which we’d played together, I thought: “You don’t have to do the same thing forever.”

At other times, though, I’ve given up and regretted it. I’ve set aside projects that can never be resumed, or friendships that will never be rekindled. I gave up on a troubled relationship with a relative who later had a disabling stroke, after which our bond could never be repaired. Sometimes we give up wrongly, or with devastating results; we might not even know the costs of what we’ve foregone.

It would be nice if, before we gave up, we could decide on the meaning of what we’re doing. We can certainly tell ourselves that we’re being reasonable, or making room for something new. Often, though, it’s the unfolding of events themselves that determines the shape of the story. My wife and I met on the last day of college, then went our separate ways; afterward, I wrote her a note, suggesting that we should hang out, but she didn’t write back. A few weeks went by; I wasn’t sure what to do. In the end, after some hesitation, I decided to use a new technology—e-mail—and write to her again. Our lives are made of moments like these: opportunities missed, or barely seized. Burkeman and Phillips are right to say that giving up can be useful, but it’s also a way of embracing uncertainty, not exerting control—and, for that reason, it can’t be easily domesticated. It brings us too close to the unanswerable question, What if? ♦