Never Give Up! Or Why I No Longer Like the Word “Struggle”

It sounds great, doesn’t it?
Almost like a motivational poster:
“Never give up!”

You feel an urge to straighten your back, clench your fists, and march forward… somewhere.
The only problem is: where exactly?

Because if we never give up, that usually means we’re fighting.
And if we’re fighting, then for what?
And even more importantly — against whom?

I’ve worked with people for many years, and more and more often I find myself thinking that struggle is one of the most expensive ways to live. Expensive in the most literal sense. It costs us energy, health, time, and often joy. And the bill arrives regardless of the outcome — whether we win or lose.

When someone says to me, “I’m fighting,” I usually hear the unspoken continuation:
“…and I’m already exhausted.”

Giving up is not the same as losing

For some reason, surrender is automatically associated with defeat.
You give up — you lose.
You lose — you lose something important.
And loss is frightening.

Fear of loss is one of the strongest fears I encounter in my work. Sometimes it shows up in rather amusing forms. For example, people who hold on to a few extra kilos not because they enjoy them, but because they’re afraid: What if without them I’m no longer myself?
As if those kilos were the last thread holding their identity together.

The same applies to jobs, relationships, habits — even to the phrase “that’s just the way I am.”
Fear triggers struggle. Just in case. What if I manage to hold on? What if I win?

But when our actions are driven not by curiosity about what might emerge, but by terror of losing what we already have, we are guaranteed one thing: experience. Any kind. Victory or defeat. Triumph or helplessness. Experience is always valuable. Yet we tend to crave only victory and avoid defeat — even though both are simply experiences we can build upon.

Not every victory is a gift

The story of Pyrrhus is one of my favorite examples of “successful success” — the kind that makes you want to lie down afterward and stare at the ceiling.

Pyrrhus was a brilliant military leader. He did defeat the Romans. Formally speaking. But the cost of that victory was so high that he famously said, “One more such victory and I am lost.”

And this is painfully relatable.
We “win” arguments in relationships — and lose closeness.
We win at work — and lose sleep.
We win debates — and end up alone, thinking, Well, at least I was right.

Sometimes victory is just exhaustion wearing a medal.

And sometimes defeat saves us

Thomas Edison is the perfect counterexample. By all external standards, nothing was working for him. Thousands of experiments. Thousands of failures. If he’d had an internal accountant, the project would have been shut down long ago.

But Edison wasn’t fighting reality. He wasn’t trying to prove that the light bulb had to exist. He was exploring. With curiosity. With interest. Occasionally, no doubt, with irritation — he was human, after all.

Then one “failure” involving a bamboo filament turned out to be a clue. Not a victory. Not a defeat. A direction. And from that came the first truly practical electric light bulb.

This is the key point: Edison wasn’t at war with reality. He was collaborating with it.

So what do we do instead of struggling?

More and more often, I invite people to replace the question
“How do I win?”
with a much quieter one:
“Why am I in this at all?”

Sometimes the best move isn’t forward or backward — but sideways.
Sometimes giving up means saving yourself.
Sometimes “losing” is simply a polite exit from a game that was never yours to begin with.

I don’t believe in universal slogans.
I believe in conscious choice.
And if we are going to invest our energy, let it be not in struggle, but in creation. In life. In curiosity. In what nourishes us instead of draining us.

Because energy is a limited resource.
And life, fortunately, is much wider than any battlefield.