The Permission to Abandon

I tend toward being somewhat of a completionist. Not in the realm of getting all the achievements or reading every footnote, but in the sense of, once I start something, I want to see it to its Natural End. And, until recently, that Natural End did not include the idea of abandonment.

For years, I'd force myself to muddle through books I ended up hating, games I found boring, or podcasts that didn't click, constantly looking for the part where it gets good. And never finding it.

That is, until recently. David Pierce's excellent Installer newsletter at The Verge introduced me to a lovely app called Sequel. It's a relatively simple tracker for video games, books, movies, and TV series. A content consumption organizer, if you will. And I do love me some organization. I subscribed to the premium tier shortly after downloading the app, and I've been using it frequently for the past few months.

The app allows me to collect the things which I wish to consume in categories and lists, and I can assign a status to each one. In the example of video games: Wishlist, Backlog, Playing, Played, and Abandoned (We'll get back to that last one). It also keeps track of release dates where relevant and, perhaps my favorite feature, integrates with howlongtobeat to show an estimated time of how long it might take to finish that particular game.

Let's take a closer look at the Abandoned status. At first, I thought of it as a curiosity, something that's meant to be used infrequently when I get distracted by something else, or life gets in the way. But, slowly, I started taking it as a license to abandon finishing things. Keeping with the video games example, when I started to lose interest in Starfield, I decided rather quickly to move it to the Abandoned category and move on to something I'd enjoy more.

As I started to do this more and more, I found myself being much more interested with the content that I was following through on, since I can now know that I'm really into it. I've started to realize that free time is far too precious to waste it on things I'm not fully committed to. And, the beauty of this organization system is, I can catalog all the things I've abandoned and revisit them at some point in the future. Or perhaps never. It's the cataloging of these items that sets me free to forget about them.

The final piece to fall into place was a line in Citizen Sleeper that resonated with me. During one conversation, Castor says to the player, "It is the nature of life to leave things unfinished." That line coalesced all these thoughts for me and solidified that license to abandon. Mandating that I finish anything I start goes against the nature of life itself.

Consider this your license to abandon that game that didn't as good as you thought it would be, that book that isn't clicking, or that TV series that doesn't "get good" until season four. Stick with the things that are working for you, and abandon the things that aren't.