After three years and more than 20 rejections, I asked myself a difficult question: should I give up? The evidence seemed clear. American universities did not want me as a philosophy graduate student.
The world was telling me that an academic life was nothing more than a teenage dream. My lifelong goal of becoming a professional philosopher appeared to founder on the shoals of academia. It was time to decide whether it made sense to continue pursuing what the world told me was an unachievable project.
But how does one decide when it’s time to give up? In theory, there is a tidy formula to know when to abandon a goal: when the expected utility of quitting becomes greater than the expected utility of pursuing it. But, of course, the clean theoretical answer dissolves in the strange complexities of life.
When we face the question of giving up in reality, expected utility is really just an arbitrary personal estimation. The moment for giving up is messy, determined more by one’s idiosyncratic criteria and personality than anything that could reasonably be considered objective. This opens the door to further questions: what if the next try is the successful one?
Am I letting all of my past efforts go to waste? What kind of person am I if I give up? It is especially difficult to abandon goals when we are surrounded by stories of victorious grit.
Popular culture adores portrayals of unlikely success, of those who experience setbacks, keep trying, refuse to surrender, and then, despite the overwhelming odds, win. But the value of persistence not only permeates popular culture. It has also prompted moral philosophers to stress the virtues of grit.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
