I had to quit a number of things to finally quit the very preconception that quitting is always wrong. My own experience has also taught me that it is not.
The decision I made this week to quit yet another social group has made me start asking myself anew what I quit and what I did not quit, and what divided them. I've been intrigued more by categories of what I did (not) quit than by individual cases.
One thing I already know for sure is that I've quit all the conventional human social groups, including communities and clubs, which I joined voluntarily or involuntarily. One fresh case has just joined this long "honorable" list. ;-)
The experience of being forced to quit one social group which I had also been forced to join as a result of my violating one of its unwritten rules has made me very - or even too - sensitive to the collective ego of any social group I subsequently joined, even voluntarily. The same pattern repeated itself again and again. After the initial stage of "honeymoon", I start to feel more and more suffocated.
I wrote about this category in detail in my companion blog entry in Russian, so if you are interested, you are welcome to read it there. Even if you don't read Russian, you can use DeepL, which is, in my opinion, the best machine translation tool.
Even after spending quite some time trying to recall things I quit, I haven't been able to identify any other significant category except for one, which consists of only one individual case - quitting alcohol. This category is very unique in that, unlike all the other things I quit, I quit drinking with no relation whatsoever to my own willpower. Every time I told others that I had quit drinking, they praised my strong willpower. I had to try to explain that this occurred precisely when I let go of my willpower to control things.
Now let me switch to the second half of the question of this writing - what I did not quit - which intrigues me no less. Here again I've tried to recall all the meaningful things I didn't quit and categorize them. One significant category has emerged, and I haven't even realized the common denominator among the things in this category until now.
It took me ten years to finish my PhD dissertation, another ten years to find a permanent position in academia, and eight years to find a spouse since I felt I was ready for marriage. At first sight, these three cases of not quitting don't seem to have anything in common. But I've just identified their common denominator. Back then I had a very strong inner motive to persevere instead of quitting before reaching the goal.
In retrospect, I have good reason to believe now that if I had had only an external motive or motives, I might have quit even after encountering the first "threshold guardian".
Now I also realize that this contrast between inner and external motives may be parallel to the contrast between unconditional love and conditional love and between joy as the natural state of the soul and the so-called happiness. The latter, that is, external motives, conditional love, and happiness, all depend on external factors, which by nature come and go and are thus ephemeral. On the other hand, if we base ourselves on something more stable, we have a much higher chance of persevering.
This may also explain why I've been continuing my rather solitary study of Russian. My motives are not only utilitarian but even concern something spiritual. In this respect, my continued study of Russian might even be a spiritual practice for me, so constantly changing external factors don't affect my perseverance.
In retrospect, I learned this unconsciously when I persevered to finish writing my PhD dissertation, finding a permanent position in academia, and finding a spouse. This spiritual "muscle", so to speak, hasn't quit me since then and has remained with me as a kind of "muscle memory".
I started this writing to ask myself a pair of two seemingly mutually exclusive choices - what I quit and what I did not quit. But having written this far, I now realize that they seem to have something fundamental in common: all my decisions to quit or not to quit, at least concerning the above-mentioned things, seem to concern integrity. That is, I quit what turned out to be misaligned with my nonnegotiable core values, and I continued what was aligned with them even after encountering more than one "threshold guardian" along the way.