Giving up is something all animals do. Our pursuit of a particular outcome is always weighed against the required energy and exertion; when the output exceeds the potential benefit, animals give up and move on. Thus a woodpecker will doggedly ram its beak into a tree trunk in pursuit of a beetle grub, but if the wood’s too hard, it gives up and moves on.
In people, giving up is more complex. Our social structures and the activities associated with them include not simply satisfying our individual desires, but fulfilling social imperatives of employment, morality, legal obligations, and the like. When we are being paid to accomplish something, for example, giving up is not a viable option. Even when frustrated, we often must continue, and human beings are predictably frustrating.
There are many among us who are well-intentioned but frustrating, and others ill-intentioned and frustrating. Welcome to the club; frustration is inevitable and deciding if and when to give up is something we all face from time to time. Giving up often means turning our attention to something or someone else and yet being human means enduring repeated frustration. We try mightily to engineer life to only have positive outcomes by accumulating money, friendships, influence, power and security, but the world is too complex to fully control. Developmental solutions to this problem vary.
Some people become saintly, willingly accepting frustration and disappointment, but there are few of those among us. The Buddhist Bodhisattva accepts failure and disappointment for countless kalpas, periods of time equal to sixteen million years. That’s a lot of frustration. Most of us have far less tolerance, and so it is we suffer. Being human and pursuing desires means suffering is inevitable.
Giving up on desire is one choice, of course, but not one well-suited to a world where the pursuit of happiness has been elevated to a virtue. Notably, one person’s happiness is often at the price of another’s distress, and knowledge of this generates its own frustration. Even giving up is no curative in the long run. Suffering is, like they say, baked into being human.
We try to distract ourselves from suffering, for sure, and have built entire industries and economies to do so. Distractions last only so long, though, and over time they lose their efficacy. When someone we love dies, distraction fails. Grief is impervious to philosophy, and so too, to distraction. So it is with any great sense of loss; the greater the loss the more difficult it is to accept it.
In an analogy to digital technology, I’ve previously noted that being human is a “lossy file format.” Over time, we lose who we are and what we’ve accumulated bit by bit, and ultimately, we lose everything: our memories, our loves, our things, and even our bodies. In the end, we all surrender. Meanwhile, life goes on, perhaps for endless kalpas, so what’s to do?
If I were Catholic, I’d have a picture of St. Jude on my refrigerator, the patron Saint of Lost Causes. He is pictured with a flame emanating from his head, symbolizing the warmth of compassion. He holds a staff, a symbol of steadfastness. Philosophy, knowledge and even wisdom only go so far; when it comes to coping with frustration it is only the warmth of compassion that can overcome the cool resignation of giving up.
