Giving up is the best feeling ever!

“It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything”

Tyler Durden.

This quote resonates so well because most(?) of us innately find pleasure in complete surrender. Almost like a primal instinct to submit oneself to the master, whoever that may be. Quite a few pack animals do this, dogs, for example, instinctively roll over and lay at their most vulnerable in front of the leader of their pack, which is usually their human owner. There are many other pack animal that behave similarly.

But you see this behaviour not only in the world of biology. Nature, as a whole, is like a machine designed for the purpose to find the state of least resistance. One of the most fundamental principles of the physics of motion is the principle of least action, it has it’s roots in the 1600’s when Pierre de Fermat postulated that “light travels between two given points along the path of shortest time”. See, we, given our current state, are much more a product of our environment, than of our own design or desire and as such depend heavily on the dynamics of that environment, no matter how much we’d like to believe otherwise.

However, larger and larger parts of our lives are being allocated towards activities that have no primal instinct to thank for their existence. The work you do beyond what is required to sustain yourself is one example. Any attempt at creation is another. But since these are difficult, you might even say non-natural, they can become a burden if you keep on failing, sometimes too difficult to bare. Our natural reaction then is to divert ourselves to the path of least resistance, a.k.a. - to give up.

“There will come a time when you have a chance to do the right thing.”

“I love those moments. I like to wave at them as they pass by.”

Jack Sparrow