So giving up, in its myriad forms, we need to remember, whatever else it is, is a gift-giving (and it is always up and never down, as though to some higher authority). To give something up is to seek one’s own assumed advantage, one’s apparently preferred pleasure, but in an economy that we mostly can’t comprehend, or, like all economies, predict.

It is not then a story about giving something up, it is a story about extending a repertoire; or about what the poet William Empson called ‘straddling the contradictions’. You can’t get the boon and benefit of a contradiction by taking sides.

we tend to value, and even idealize, the idea of seeing things through, of finishing things rather than abandoning them. Giving up has to be justified in a way that completion does not; giving up doesn’t usually make us proud of ourselves; it is a falling short of our preferred selves; unless, of course, it is the sign of an ultimate and defining r