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THIS is not just about the decision of the president of the United States. That is, however, a good place to begin. On Sunday, President Joe Biden decided to forego competing for elections for a second term. Beyond the political strategising, it is a bizarre decision. Here you have a situation where a man elected to the most powerful position in the world, who commands the world’s largest and most advanced military and the world’s largest economy, has voluntarily relinquished the possibility of doing it again for another four years.
The political particulars of the situation will undoubtedly be discussed at length by any number of analysts and political commentators over the next few weeks. Beyond that, however, is the startling scenario of someone giving up an opportunity or a position that they had worked for all of their lives. As history has long shown, those with the most power are least likely to want to give it up — such is after all the intoxication of great importance that those occupying very high positions began to believe in the myth of their own significance. Those who can separate the office or position from themselves are extraordinary in every way.
There is also the underlying question of knowing when it makes more sense to give something up rather than to hold on to it, when quitting —counter-intuitive as that is — makes more sense than continuing the course. One reason that this is a tricky issue is that we quit all the time-and most times we are inordinately talented at coming up with reasons that justify doing so. We construct lists of them in our head, share them with those with whom we speak, and so on.
Sometimes we curse the goal itself as not worthy of having been followed — the destination was misunderstood somehow, or other extraneous circumstances justified the abandonment of what was once intended. All of this is normal and a part of the usual circumstances.
The question becomes one of how close we are to fulfilling our life’s purpose.
It is also true that we sometimes struggle with giving up things in which we have invested a good bit of our efforts and resources. One example is a person who once he or she begins to read a book or watch a movie feels great pressure, halfway through or even earlier, to complete reading or watching it.
This is true even if the book or the movie is objectively awful — the person is not enjoying it or getting any enrichment at all from the exercise. This means that a large chunk of one’s time, even leisure time, is wasted on reading to the end books that one does not like or watching an inane movie until its over. In cases like this, the issue is misconstrued as one of staying the course versus giving up. The actual issue here is of giving oneself grace for having made an incorrect assessment.
It can be illustrated from a much larger example. In recent weeks, a video went viral on YouTube and TikTok. The video features an MIT-trained neurosurgeon who is now unemployed and spending time with his dog hiking in the mountains. In the video, the doctor explains how he spent years and years training to be a brain-spinal cord surgeon. What motivated him, he explained, was the possibility that he could one day relieve human suffering.
However, as he progressed in his field, he found that he was not always able to relieve his patients’ suffering. In fact, he discovered that more often than not he was not able to relieve suffering and sometimes even ended up causing more of it. This was too much of a burden on his conscience and he found that the situation was causing him great moral injury. He was the sole breadwinner and felt that the years of training and the course he had chosen meant that he should stay with it. But his thoughts caused him to sink into a deep depression until ultimately, he decided to quit.
Decisions like this are complicated. Many of us have been or will be in situations where we feel like there are no choices at all or the ones that we have are so constricted and constrained that they are just as good as not having a choice. Here is where the measure of our character lies. Whether it is the case of the American president or a neurosurgeon or one of us, the question becomes one of how close we are to fulfilling our life’s purpose and how diligent we are being in avoiding harm to those who are dependent on us.
These considerations are generally good in allowing us to see that not only do we always have the opportunity to make choices but that in some cases, what is best for us and for other people involves giving ourselves the grace to say that we may have misjudged an earlier situation. When we make decisions to pursue a certain course, whether it is to begin or end a relationship, read a book, watch a movie, quit a career or even the American presidency we do it with the information that is best available to us in that moment.
Times change, new challenges arise, people betray us and others join us in our journeys and through all this new information becomes available that requires reassessment. Sometimes, such a reassessment means that we must change course, quit the path that we have been on and begin a new journey. Giving up on some things, some paths, some people is good sometimes because while our choices may not always be good ones, we do always have a choice.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, July 24th, 2024
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