Issue 108: Giving up — on intellectual life after academia

Reflections on leaving, learning, and Adam Phillips' 'On Giving Up'

The day I walked into my PhD program in political theory at an R1 institution, I learned my chosen advisor had left. It should have been a sign, but I was young, broke, and too scared to question it. Instead, I did what felt safe: I let myself be steered into quantitative research. If you've ever had your heart set on diving deep into critical theory only to find yourself staring at regression tables, you know the particular ache I mean. Econometrics is no Adorno, and my soul felt it every day.

I tried to feed my intellectual hunger where I could, sneaking into theory classes both in my department and in a welcoming continental philosophy program nearby. Looking back, I see the crossroads clearly: I could have transferred, fought for a different path. But by then, something in me had already begun to dim. The constant performance of certainty in seminars, the way critique was wielded like a weapon rather than offered as a gift - it all felt so far from the life of the mind I'd imagined. So I finished my MA, took a leave of absence, and six months later sent the email that would end my academic career. My graduate chair never responded, and somehow that silence said everything about the institution I was leaving.

I know that SMART v. PRETTY is not a choice that anybody needs to make AND I know that ideally we are operating in a world of body neutrality… but when I was growing up, I clearly remember having a moment where I kind of reckoned with myself and basically accepted that… ok… we are going for smart… and that was that. It didn’t feel like a choice exactly but it did feel final. And here's the thing about building your entire identity around being "smart": when you leave academia, it feels less like changing careers and more like death. When you've staked your whole sense of self on academic achievement, walking away feels like watching your identity crumble in real time.

Earlier this week, I found myself immersed in Adam Phillips' latest book, On Giving Up, and it cracked something open in me. On the very first page, he writes:

We give things up when we believe we can change; we give up when we believe we can't.

Reading those words, I felt seen in a way that two decades of processing my academic exit hadn't achieved. We make all sorts of sacrifices in the name of improving our lives and feel relatively upbeat about those. But what happens when we find ourselves in a situation that we don’t think we can improve? There is a dispair and terror of just wanting to give up, says Phillips. But does it have to be that hard?

Adam Phillips. Photo by Richard Saker

Phillips, writing from his experience as a psychoanalyst, challenges our cultural obsession with linear progress and getting better. He suggests that our rush to improve ourselves often blinds us to the rich possibilities that lie in uncertainty. What struck me most was his framing of giving up not as mere failure, but as a psychological move that reveals what we most deeply want and fear. Phillips writes:

In the ordinary course of events, when we give up, or give up on something or something, we are not ostensibly asking whether life is or is not worth living: we are asking either whether what we had wanted to do is worth doing, or whether we have the ability to do it. When I give up I am admitting failure, or acknowledging loss of desire, or seeking the pleasures of sabotage. But giving up, for whatever reason, has become in this situation what I want, what I want to do.

These words stopped me cold. For years, I'd carried my departure from academia like a secret shame. Sure, Phillips argues, you can think of giving up as terminal disillusionment but if you do, you should also consider the opposite end of that spectrum – giving up as enlightening disillusionment, which brings with it the questions and the possibility, of a future.

I see this clearly in my own journey away from academia. It wasn’t just about putting an end to my dream of becoming a professor. I now know that what I was after all along was a better relationship to what I thought intellectual work could look like for me. I knew I wouldn’t miss the lived experience of being in that program but I was terrified of quitting prematurely because where I came from, we finish what we started. In this book, Phillips (thankfully) blows up the cultural consensus that persistence is always virtuous, suggesting instead that giving up can be either transformative or destructive, depending on whether it stems from a belief in change or a loss of faith in possibility:

But giving up as a prelude, a precondition for something else to happen, a form of anticipation, a kind of courage, is a sign of the death of a desire; and by the same token, it can make room for other desires.

This framing has helped me understand my own academic exodus differently. On the opposite spectrum of persistence and sticking-with-it is not failure but freedom. Giving up on graduate school opened up a space for what Phillips describes as the non-compliant self of spontaneity and desire and singularity, the self committed to play rather than adaptation or, indeed, to compliance, involves no more or no less than collecting together the entails of the experience of aliveness. Giving up allowed me to release myself from the tyranny of personal and cultural ideals that no longer served me.

A self-directed intellectual life — an intellectual life outside of institutional structures — embodies precisely the kind of uncertainty that Phillips values. Engaging with ideas in this way requires a particular kind of courage — the courage to think without predetermined frameworks, to follow curiosity wherever it leads. Personal voice, emotional resonance, and intellectual wandering become vital sources of insight and connection. I shudder when I remember how vicious grad school seminars could feel at times. On Substack, we can disagree about books but still - horror of all horrors - be kind to one another. My goal here is not to be a figure of authority. My personal goal is to create and join spaces for the purpose of thinking together about what matters.

Seventeen years after leaving academia, I'm still wondering about the life I thought I wanted then, and the life I'm making now, word by word, book by book, in this space we share. But Phillips' work helps me see that this ongoing wonder, this productive ambivalence about my path, isn't something to resolve or overcome. Instead, it's the very energy that keeps this intellectual journey alive and meaningful. The trauma of academic failure hasn't disappeared, but it has transformed into something else: a reminder of how giving up one version of intellectual life made space for another, equally valuable one to emerge.

After I read the Phillips book, I was looking for podcast discussions about it and came across this excellent conversation between LARB editors Medaya Ocher, Kate Wolf, and Eric Newman at the LARB Radio Hour podcast.

At some point in the conversation, the editors start sharing personal examples of giving up and Medaya Ocher tells the story of deciding not to finish her PhD at UCLA, emailing the department and - like me - not getting any kind of response. I gasped!!! They laugh about it but - WHAT IN THE WORLD?! Are graduate programs everywhere run by petty children?!

And some questions for you:

• I have a hunch that many of the readers of this newsletter have at some point in their life built identities around their intellect and being smart. How has that worked for you? How has it not served you?

• How do you think about giving up? Are you a stick-it-till-the-end kind of person? How pronounced is your non-compliant streak?

• What have you given up that felt like torture at the time but in retrospect was a new beginning?

I turn 44 next weeks and to celebrate, I am offering 20% off annual subscriptions through the end of February. Get it while it’s hot! And, thank you so much for your support!