Giving Up (2 page)

hard
work, I say to myself as I'm heading down to the basement, I should probably start off with a few minor tasks in order to warm up, as it were, before dedicating myself to the all-consuming resolution that will monopolize my time for the foreseeable future and prevent me from working on these smaller things that require less focus, commitment, and strenuous mental effort, and that can be accomplished in a couple of hours and leave me with a sense of fulfillment, no matter how mistaken or undeserved this sensation actually is. Despite all the resolutions from the night before, I decide to start on some small, almost insignificant task. Before I can buckle down, I tell myself, I must review the work that I've accomplished thus far, so that I have a better idea of what the next step should be. I go down into the basement and start reviewing the work that I've done over the last year, and the first thought that occurs to me as I'm conducting my review is that I haven't done any work of value or substance for at least a year, maybe longer. Basically I have been wasting my time, which means I am also wasting the time of my family and friends. Whenever they have asked me about my work and have been forced to listen as I bitch and moan, complain and gripe, carrying on for hours in bitter self-pitying tones, they are having their time doubly wasted. Not only do they have to listen to the petty ramblings of a dissatisfied failure, which is a time-waster like no other, but the very basis of my complaints is completely imaginary. I talk their ears off about the insurmountable obstacles that I have to face when, in fact, no such difficulties exist because I am not really working. My friends have lost years of their lives listening to my imaginary problems with my imaginary work. But that's not even the worst part. No, the worst part, the most sad and pathetic aspect of my work in the basement, is that nobody actually cares whether I really am working or just telling people that I'm working. Aside from the annoyance, or, if they love me, the anguish, that comes with having to listen to me go on and on about some project or goal or dream that I haven't a hope in hell of realizing, and aside from the simple fact that the time spent listening to me talk about my life's work for the hundredth or even thousandth time could have been used more productively, nobody really cares what I do when I'm down in the basement, which is to say that nobody cares about the work
per se
, they care only insofar as it causes pain and distress in my life, and consequently in theirs as well. If I was already a success and had accrued some fame and accolades for accomplishments in my field, then maybe people would wonder about what I was working on. The only reason anybody cares about whether somebody is working or not is if they have already done something great and path-breaking, in which case there is good reason, or at least a reasonable possibility, to think that they may continue to do great work in the future, perhaps even greater work than what they have already accomplished. We look forward to news about their progress and wait impatiently for them to hurry up and repeat their earlier successes. And the fact that so many people care about the work this person is doing draws even more people into the anxious crowd awaiting the next installment. ‘She is doing important work,' they say, and the fact that so many people are in agreement about the value of her previous work is a testament to just how important the work really is, they also say. But if we have yet to produce any work at all, whether it be important or completely insignificant, then it is quite simply impossible for anyone to give a shit one way or the other about how we spend our time, so long as it doesn't interfere with whatever they've got going on in their lives. It's not that they don't trust someone who claims to be doing great work but who hasn't produced any great work to date – it's that they
can't
trust someone who hasn't produced anything. Trust, by definition, has to be based on something (otherwise it's not trust, it's
faith
), and in the absence of any accomplished work to base it upon people can only wish you well, without being able to care what happens with the work you are allegedly slaving away on. There is no such thing as potential work, there is only accomplished work. When I've been complaining for hours about the various obstacles, both real and imaginary, that have been preventing me from completing the first phase of what I have already decided will be my life's work, and the friend or family member that has been forced to sit and listen finally interrupts me to say that they really hope that I'm able to overcome these obstacles and complete the first phase, it's entirely possible that they are telling the truth, but only in the sense that they want me to complete my work for my own sake, so I can finally stop obsessing about it and enjoy the satisfaction of accomplishing something of great and lasting importance, or for their own sake, so that they no longer have to sit through my painfully self-absorbed complaints, or, if they are a close friend, so that they don't have to watch me suffer. If I could somehow be relieved of the anguish caused by my work without having to actually complete the work itself these so-called friends of mine would be all for it. They wouldn't encourage me to keep going, to defy all the odds and everyone who had been telling me to give up. They wouldn't say, ‘But you've come so far. It would be insane to stop working now after all you've done. And besides,' they wouldn't say, ‘what you're doing is necessary and important.' Instead they would say, ‘I don't know, maybe it's a good idea. Maybe all you need is a break, and then when you come back to it in a couple months or a year's time, you'll be refreshed and ready to work again.' Rather than spurring me on to the finish, they would wholeheartedly endorse a plan to give everything up, to simply abandon what has been the sole purpose of my life for so many years, and not because they were uncaring or cruel, but because, for them, the work did not exist in the first place. It wasn't real. When I say ‘my life's work' to my friends and family, I might as well be saying ‘my imaginary friend.' I might as well say, ‘I spent all last night in the basement with my imaginary friend.' If they asked if they could meet my imaginary friend I would say ‘not yet.' I would tell them that at that point in time it wasn't possible to see my imaginary friend. ‘In fact,' I would say, ‘you wouldn't even be able to see him if I showed him to you.' This is exactly what I tell people when they ask to see what I've been working on. ‘You can't see it right now,' I say. ‘It's too soon. It's not ready. It doesn't look like anything at this point. There's nothing to see.' The only reason anyone believes me when I tell them that I've been working on something is because there's no hard evidence against it. But it's clear that people are starting to have their doubts. I've been talking about my work for so long, without ever giving anyone even the tiniest glimpse of what I am working on, that they're starting to question just how much work I've been doing down there in the basement. And it's a fair question, because lately, if anyone were to spy on me while I was down in the basement, they might fall under the impression that I'm not doing any work at all. For long periods at a time – not just hours, but days, and weeks, and months – I sit in the basement and do anything but work. Once I get home from my real job, I go down to the basement to start on my life's work, but, as I already mentioned, before I start anything new I tell myself that I need to review what I've already accomplished. Because I've been working at it for so long there are so many different aspects that I have to keep in mind at all times and the only way to do this is to review my recent work. Of course it doesn't take me very long to spot an error or a flaw, and I'm obliged to put off starting anything new until I fix it. So I work away on this until I've completely ruined everything I've already done. ‘Great,' I'll say to myself. ‘Just fucking great. Not only am I not getting any new work done, but I'm completely destroying everything that I've already done.' Whenever I start work, which is always very late in the day since I don't even get started until I've worked a full eight hours at my real job, I say to myself, ‘Now don't go making any big decisions. In fact, don't do anything at all. Just do a quick review and pick up where you left off yesterday, then start in on the new work.' But within a few minutes I'm totally immersed, and in no time at all I become convinced that everything I've done up to that point is wrong. ‘My life's work,' I say to myself, ‘is a total disaster. From day one I've been heading in the wrong direction. I should start over right now. Ditch everything I've done and start fresh.' One of the big differences between me and those people you hear about who defied the odds and stuck to their guns and made their own luck is that I don't really want to succeed. If I did want to succeed, if in fact I had been telling the truth all along and had actually been devoted to success, no matter what the cost, the effect, the toll, etc., if I was really serious about my work, and not just dicking around in the basement, then wouldn't I be willing to throw it all out in order to achieve my stated goal? Of course I would. If I actually had the drive that these so-called geniuses possess, I wouldn't even hesitate. As it stands, I'm not willing to take this sort of drastic action because I don't believe that I'm capable of pulling it off. When it comes right down to it I don't have any faith in my ability to complete the project that I have devoted my life to. So instead of starting over I spend my time trying to improve upon what I've already done, which is technically impossible. The very first step I took, the very decision to start work on a project so monstrously ambitious, was the first mistake I made, and every subsequent move in that direction has been a move in the wrong direction. But now that I've gone so far in the wrong direction I have absolutely no desire to turn around and retrace my steps to where I made that first catastrophic mistake. ‘It's too late,' I say to myself, ‘you've gone too far. You have to see it through, even though what you're seeing through is a lifetime of mistakes.' I sit there in the basement, sunk into despair, and waste my time trying to correct a small detail, because I think that this will somehow redeem, or mask, the mountain of details that are beyond fixing, but I quickly realize that it's impossible to correct this small detail without also correcting another equally small detail. I work at correcting these minor details but I end up destroying what little value there may have been in the work I've done already, because even though these small details seem almost insignificant, and this is why they can be easily corrected (unlike the more significant, pervasive, and impossible-to-fix details), once I start making these corrections, the sheer scope of my failure is brought into sharper relief. After I have finished wasting most of my time in the basement destroying my already failed project, I force myself to stop before I've ruined everything. ‘Even though what you've done so far is completely misguided and counterproductive, and the night is almost over,' I say to myself, ‘it's still better than doing nothing. So just leave it alone and from now on start going in the right direction. If you start doing good work from this point on then maybe this will somehow balance out all the bad work.' I give myself a shake and check to see how much time I have left to work, and it's at this point that I realize that the night is almost over and that I have wasted it on trying to fix the unfixable, doubly wasted it in fact, because not only have I failed to improve upon my previous work, but I have actually succeeded in making it worse. And then I start panicking that there's no time left to maybe salvage something from this disaster of a workday and I decide that the best thing to do would be to take a short little break, although it's not accurate to say that
I decide to take a short break
. The truth is that even before I came down into the basement to start on my life's work I was already looking forward to the short break I would be taking once I felt as though I'd done enough to justify taking one. I am not exaggerating when I say that this break is the highlight of my day. My break is the only part of the day when I'm not completely consumed by the dread of failure. ‘I deserve a break,' I think, ‘even if all I've done is go over work that I should've just left alone, I've still earned this short break, and I owe it to myself to enjoy my break as much as I can before I go back and finish off the rest of the workday.' It's so important to me to use my break time as effectively as possible that often during the first shift down in the basement, while I'm doubly wasting my time ruining everything I've already accomplished, I'm also simultaneously trying to decide on what to do during my break. Most of the time I'm capable of doing both (i.e. systematically destroying my previous work and planning my break), but there are occasions when the break-planning overtakes the work-ruining so that I am completely distracted and stop working altogether in order to try to resolve what I am going to do on my break so I can go back to concentrating on destroying my past work. The reason I am so consumed by the dilemma of how to spend my break is because not only is it the only time of the day that is free of despair, but it is also the only part of the day when I allow myself to do what I really want to be doing. My whole life is one long build up to the moment when I don't have to do anything. It should almost go without saying at this point in my confession that I do not want to be working, but since I'm committed to an impossible goal and because I can't see any other way around achieving success except by ceaseless and frenzied labour, I'm left with no other choice but to spend my days doing something that I can't stand. ‘I get the impression,' Mary said to me during our argument earlier today, ‘that you'd be a lot happier if you weren't working down there all the time.' And when I didn't reply (because I try not to fall into these traps that she is constantly setting for me) she continued as if I hadn't heard her, or as if I might not have understood what she meant. ‘It's just that it seems to make you so unhappy. The only time you seem to be relaxed and capable of enjoying yourself is when you don't have to work. I mean, do you even enjoy it?' ‘Of course I do,' I said, ‘why else would I be spending every waking hour working if I didn't get some sort of satisfaction out of it?' Obviously this question was meant to sound rhetorical, which is to say that it was designed to reassure Mary (and shut her up) but it was delivered without any conviction and with more than a little desperation, which is to say that it wasn't rhetorical at all. It was a straight-up question. The only answer I can think of that makes sense of why I would spend the majority of my waking hours absorbed in work that I do not enjoy, work that I may even hate, work that prevents me from achieving the everyday triumphs and goals that everyone I know who hasn't devoted themselves to some foolhardy, arrogant, ill-conceived, outdated, and impossible pursuit has been able to grasp with relative ease, because they were reasonable and attainable goals in the first place, the only reason that makes any sense is that I am working so that I can take these short breaks where I allow myself to do something that I actually enjoy doing. When I take a break from my life's work I end up doing the same sorts of things that I believe to be the pastimes of people who, since they don't live their lives devoted to an abstract and unattainable goal, live a more grounded, narrow, dim, slavish, satisfying, and rewarding day-to-day life of doing fuck all. When I was much younger and frantically trying to get my life's work under way, I didn't think that this work would involve the same variation between long periods of mundane labour punctuated by brief moments spent indulging my immediate desires and impulses that supposedly characterized the life I was trying to avoid, the unspeakably depressing fate of living for the breaks. But instead of avoiding this fate it's as though I chose the quickest route to it. Many of my friends who took the other path, the one I tried to avoid, who decided that they weren't going to waste their time chasing after a goal they could never be certain they would reach, who made a clear-eyed and deliberate decision to find a job or career that complemented their skills, talents, and character, and would allow for them to spend as much time as possible doing the things that they enjoy doing, these friends of mine, who I can hardly stand to be in the same room with, have all found that they actually enjoy the time they spend working. They have no problem going on about the pleasure they experience during their workday and confess that sometimes they don't even feel like taking a break, they just want to keep working. They're so absorbed in what they are doing that it doesn't even occur to them to take a break. Despite the fact that I've made no secret about how much trouble I have reaching the level of concentration required for the sort of demanding and complex work that I do down in the basement, and regardless of the fact that I make no effort to hide the anguished expression on my face as I'm held hostage by their enthusiasm and genuine affection for the positions that they have ended up in as a result of practical convenience, they are seemingly devoid of sympathy for my situation and go on like this for the entire dinner or cocktail or coffee or whatever the premise is that we've decided to meet under. Everything I have done, every choice I have made, has been focused on creating a life for myself that is the exact opposite of the one I am currently living. When I am out with my so-called