Giving Up Read Online Free

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