Giving Up Read Online Free Page A

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