On Giving Up

Although we’re talking rather philosophically and at length about these aspects of death, we are arriving at something important. When we understand what we fear, we can untangle that fear and are more likely to be released from it. If the key to why we fear death is that it deprives us of furthering our projects and seeing them to completion, we m

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You’re right that profound grief quickly pushes you away from both certitude and indifference, which are unproductive feelings—

That’s right. Certitude and indifference. They’re the problems with this world.

For another: The previous answer may sound all sociological and abstract, but the more primal answer is that we fix things and hold on to things because we ourselves don’t want to be thrown away. You don’t want to feel as if you are disposable to your partner, your children, your coworkers. You want to be as relevant and vital as you can, for as lo

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the psychotherapist Bruce Tift, ‘we don’t have to consciously participate in what it’s like to feel claustrophobic, imprisoned, powerless, and constrained by reality’.12 This struggle against the distressing constraints of reality is what some old-school psychoanalysts call ‘neurosis’, and it takes countless forms, from workaholism and commitment-p

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