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Lindsay Crouse used to define herself as not a quitter.
She went to Harvard University, where she learned to become even more high-achieving and ambitious, then landed an assistant job at the New York Times and worked her way up to become an opinion writer and producer. On the weekends, Crouse ran marathons and did endurance sports, clocking new personal bests throughout her thirties.
“My entire life was really guided by only one question: how can I go harder, and do more?” she says now over Zoom.
Over time, though, that mentality began to backfire. After having two children, Crouse started falling behind, dropping balls and losing her passion for running and writing. Something needed to change.
Like Crouse, many of us are conditioned to persevere. In her new book The Case For Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out, she reckons with the costs and traps of never giving up – and how she set herself free.
Now Crouse argues quitting is essential for a satisfying, successful life. She herself left her prestigious job to chase unknown risks and rewards. “We need to start viewing quitting as a tool of perseverance, rather than the enemy of it,” she said. “If we find ourselves in a hole, often we dig harder when we should just stop digging.”
Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What is the biggest misconception we have about quitting?
In the moment, not quitting in some ways feels heroic, like you’re martyring yourself to your own capacity or grit. In fact, you’re actually limiting yourself, because you’re not walking away from things that are failing. In the long run, if we want to do our best, we need to get better at quitting. It could be a pivot or a break, but ultimately I think that can help us do better and go further.
Quitting involves entertaining uncertainty and oftentimes risk, but focusing on that means we don’t ask ourselves: are we continuing because we love what we’re doing or because we’re afraid of confronting what might happen if we stop?
What do we stand to gain from quitting?
This is about priorities: if we commit to everything, we commit to nothing. A lot of this book was me talking to myself: I really thought it was so impressive that I was saying yes to everything, like “Wow, look at all you can do!” Writing it, I realised that attitude was a lot more narrow-minded and even timid than I was willing to admit.
Saying yes to everything is saying no to what matters. By quitting things that don’t, we can better commit to what’s meaningful and build our lives around that.
Sometimes, you hit a roadblock when you’re working towards something. How do we know when to quit, and when to push through?
I’m not encouraging people not to engage with struggle or develop resilience. This book is for people who are almost so good at enduring that they don’t realise the costs that come with it. It’s like they’ve confused their ability to persevere with a mandate that they should.
I talk about “quitting intelligence”, which is learning to separate temporary setbacks from fundamental futility: how are we thinking about continuing? Are we rationalising it, feeling desperate to salvage something that we’ve already invested in, veering into self-sabotage?
With longer-term goals, we can think about progress: are we getting closer to what we want over time, or moving further away? Are we working hard productively, or pointlessly? Those two things help us to assess whether it’s time to quit or invest.
If you start working harder or change your approach, and still don’t see the results you want, maybe you’re in the wrong arena and your efforts might be better suited somewhere. If you’re enjoying what you’re doing, that is valuable enough. But if you’re frustrated that it’s not working out, you can just stop and do something else. That sounds obvious, but I think sometimes we tell ourselves we don’t have that choice.
Why do we persevere with things that we know, deep down, we would be better off giving up?
We’ve learned to ignore very instinctive cues. I realised that I’d done the same, writing about a study done on zebrafish at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. At first, when zebrafish encounter a strong current, they will respond with a surge of effort, but if that doesn’t work, they will give up. This is judged by specialised cells in their brains, which scientists call “futility counters”. Zebrafish know to listen to these cues because it factors into their survival, but humans have learned to override them.
A lot of it comes down to the idea of control: where we really want something to happen, we convince ourselves that we have the power to achieve it through hard work, but sometimes we’re denying futility. We equate the idea of being a quitter with being a failure, but often we fail to see that the failure has already happened. We just throw more into it, investing more in a lost cause, and that’s the greatest failure of all.
You interviewed dozens of people about their quitting stories. Did any of them change your thinking?
I interviewed a woman who was going through devastating rounds of IVF. Having a child was central to what she wanted from life, and she sacrificed an entire decade to that cause, putting all these wonderful things on hold for this goal that simply wasn’t happening. Meanwhile, it was making her miserable.
Eventually, she quit IVF and moved on with her life. When I reached out to her a year or two later for fact-checking, she had a baby, having become pregnant naturally at 41 – she didn’t know how. It just confirmed that she never had control in the first place.
That made me think about what isn’t working in my life that I might be refusing to acknowledge. A lot of us just push harder, letting the work itself convince us and stand in for the results or success we’re seeking. We can control how hard we work, but we can’t always control the outcome.
How can we navigate “hope-selling industries” like IVF and dating apps, while protecting our wellbeing?
We need to be mindful, moderate our engagement and create checkpoints for ourselves. The decision scientist Annie Duke calls these “kill criteria”: clear, specific conditions for quitting that we establish before we even start, and before our emotional investment can cloud our judgement.
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To some extent, these industries are disincentivised from getting us what we want: they want us to keep coming back, to keep swiping and grinding. That’s not to say don’t use them, but perseverance can become a compulsion, even pathological, and these industries don’t help.
Of course, the flipside is that a lot of people persevere and do end up with a child or a relationship, but that can also make us feel that we’re failing if we don’t. Sometimes we need to realise what actually can work and focus on that instead.
What would you tell someone who talks endlessly about leaving their partner, or quitting their job, but doesn’t act?
Staying is a decision, too. I’ve heard people say “I really want to quit, but I can’t.” I think you have to ask yourself: why can’t you? If you think you can’t quit your job because you need money, have you actually run those numbers? Maybe you have, and you don’t like them. That’s fine, but you need to own that choice to stay.
If you want to leave your relationship, but are afraid of starting over, own that. Maybe you just want to get married. Down the line, tell yourself that was a decision you made, and you knew what you were getting into. Otherwise, you can quit and do your future self a favour – your partner, too. Who wants to be in a relationship without investment?
Being only one foot in is a very passive and kind of cowardly way to live your life. You need to ask yourself: “Am I hoping that this doubt, or deliberation, is just going to abate?” That question helps you reframe the situation – and the answer is no. You have to act: either own it or leave, but don’t think that these problems will just disappear. Maybe you can put up with them, but is that the life you want?
Often we dither over these decisions because we fear making the wrong one. In quitting, do we risk future regret?
In the long course of our lives, we tend to regret inaction a lot more than action. We’re so focused on tomorrow or next week, but we need to think in the long-term: what is the gift that we can give ourselves in five or ten years’ time? It’s often acting now, so that our future selves don’t have to make this choice.
The more that we quit, the better we get at it: we’re less fearful and more able to cope with uncertainty. We have more confidence in ourselves that we’ll make it work. If we don’t develop that muscle, quitting will continue to be understandably scary, and that feeling may keep us stuck in place. Isn’t life all about growth?
What if we’re not in a position to make a big change?
Thinking about what you really want to do and how you want to spend your time can help you move forward more intentionally than just feeling like “I can’t.” For example, if your job isn’t a source of meaning and purpose for you, maybe you can get that somewhere else. Instead of a career change, maybe you need a different work environment.
Otherwise, when we want to solve a problem, often we try to add more when the solution is actually to take something away. Instead of quitting a job or ending a relationship, we can overhaul our lives significantly by eliminating clutter.
That was the case for me. I had so much digital clutter, calendar clutter, physical clutter, and routines that I’d almost slid into, like going to bed with my phone. Eliminating those smaller things helped me build the muscle for making bigger changes.
You quit your job at the New York Times early this year, after 15 years. What part did your book play in that decision?
I realised I was living decisions that I made when I was 20, and they weren’t working for me anymore. I wasn’t happy, and I wasn’t doing the kind of work I wanted to be doing. I wanted to follow my own advice and live in the uncertainty for a bit.
I didn’t write this book to convince myself to quit my job at the Times, but I would still be working there if I hadn’t, for sure. I’ve always been the kind of person to wade slowly in, rather than cannonball. I strongly believe in building an off-ramp, and this book was that for me. I am the kind of cautious person who never quits anything; I wanted to be bolder and take more risks, and I’m at a point in my life where I can.
I’m 42 now. I have a chance to take a swing and bet on myself. If I don’t, I know that’s what I’ll regret when I’m looking back at 60. That made the decision a lot easier.
For me, this book is not about quitting your job or getting a divorce; it’s about questioning the tendency to convince yourself that you can’t or shouldn’t. I felt that was essential for myself, independent of my employment status. It was this idea that I can stop – and so, sometimes, perhaps, I should.
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The Case for Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out by Lindsay Crouse is out now
