Donna Mae Alaga 
TW: Emotionally unsettling
We spend almost our entire lives learning as it is known to increase our propensity towards success, yet we’re not taught when to give up – a deemed dead end in our voyage towards our aspirations.
We are not conditioned to ask for help. We are not cultured to handle the uncomfortable feeling of helplessness as we’re caught up while finding out that our dreams our not actually within our reach.
Clouded with thoughts to let go of the last strand of courage, we all find ourselves trying to live. We transform our everyday frown into a celebrity smile hoping that it can convince others that we are lifting the burdens we all carry on our own.
Atlas did not have any choice, we do.
Yet, our knees shiver at the thought of denying we have obligations to tend to. Even a short escape from school, work, and other commitments hit us in the stomach with a painful blow, as if we have just lost one out of five-star rate in the search for the “most productive.” Our society strikes us as incapable of living the life we want without spending blood and tears, and missing out on some significant life events, be it from our peers, friends, and family.
Akin to Atlas, we crave this rebellious drive to just make things work the way we want them to, but the flow of wind behind our sails is unpredictable.
This world will continue moving on its own anyway, unbothered when a light suddenly goes out.
Amid droughts of motivation, the light didn’t falter — it was bright, but when will the flame of hope keep burning?
Forced to fit in boxes of oft-repeated narratives of success ducted to our ears to eternity, some of us don’t seem to fit in those stories — no representation at all, of the struggles we all face because they are not the TED talk type of motivational quality. They are the aftermath of crooked societal systems that still rot even if we do anything about them.
As a last and ultimate card of hope, that we could finally bring each of our families out of the slump of suffering be it from financial inequities, social oppression, or being lied to by one’s government, you name it, are we this close to giving up that we compromise our well-being for the sake of the life we thought we would be having in response to “where do you see yourself five years from now?”
It might seem counterintuitive, but giving up may not be so bad after all. You may face the grave threat of delays, shame, and going back to square one, deciding what not to pursue could be as amicable as deciding what to pursue.
Hustle culture and the endless rat run-up in the social hierarchy, are the by-products of our sentiments to survive and it did engrave in our minds that those who give up do not belong to the fittest.
This inevitable drive to become passive has an evolutionary implication. Personality psychologists like David Buss in his evolutionary theory of personality claims that traits like surgency which characterizes assertiveness do not, in all cases, guarantee a high chance of survival; that there should be a balance with empathy on the other pole. This empathy allows us, not just to reconnect with others but also with ourselves and reassess whether what we are currently doing is still worthy of our energy.
Upbringing may have taught us that giving up would likely increase the chance of us packing our clothes and wandering off streets. We dread regretting that the plants we sow will not reap fruition so we veer away from stopping even if the red flags are aimlessly waving in front of our faces.
Giving up could be the answer, although it may not seem like it, to the ebbing puzzles we all face — puzzle pieces we wrongly put into places they are not meant to be in because of pressure to figure it all out at once.
Yet, our fears are wider than the desolate sidewalks. Our fears are deeper than the sewers underneath the roads, so we never entertain the idea of giving up as if it’s an immortal sin.
Giving up is not only limited to the idea of giving up on one’s dream that no longer counts as a ‘calling’.
It could be in the form of giving up on a relationship that is no longer healthy.
It could be giving up on a hobby that costs you more than making you happy.
It could be giving up mass genocide at the expense of asserting one’s mere dominance in a specific territory.
It could be giving up on fabricating stories just to distort history.
It could be giving up, not to end it all, but to start anew.
Tabula rasa might please others who are just neophytes in their fields of interests, but to some who spend years savagely training themselves to be their best, it’s a demon who preys on them while they sleep.
Giving up is easier said than done. Our minds were not designed to admit we fail as if it’s a grave disease we don’t want anyone to know.
After all, we were not taught the art of giving up, so it is kept deep below our repertoire. We just either fight or take that flight, or worse, freeze when situations permit.
#BehindTheTrades
