Venkatesh Rao

Also cultivating the ability to care about and want many things, which is a skill too. There’s almost nothing I care about enough to not quit at the first sign of trouble/challenges. I’ve improved a bit over the years, and am now dogged and caring in pursuit of more things.

There’s a resourcefulness component too. In the OP the child wanted to simply use a hammer at one point rather than figure it out. People who want the outcome don’t care about the means as much. They’re willing to try many ways and are not attached to prowess in one way.

I’m more resourceful than I am energetic or caring, but sometimes that feels wrong to persevering types. Resourcefulness can go too far and change the goal. For eg. proving you’re right and winning over another person. If you hack the thing too weirdly, you may quit that goal.

Still overall, I think perseverance is over-rated as a virtue. We don’t quit enough or focus our perseverance narrowly enough as a species. We’ve built ourselves a frustrating world that feels like that 6-hours-to-open can must have to that little girl. This feels... unnecessary.

Ie we’ve designed the world to be way more frustrating than it needs to be. It can be much less frustrating if we choose instead to be less deterministic in outlook (go left when going right is too hard etc). Healthy quitterism is really comfort with many ways things could be.

While there is a risk to becoming low-energy/path of least resistance, I think the industrial world trained humans too far in the direction of thinking quitting is a vice, and perseverance a virtue. Because industrial logic is deterministic.

In a way perseverance as a virtue is the flip side of bureaucracy as the primary machine of civilization. The pre-moderns had the fatalist-faith/religion as their primary virtue/mechanism pair, while ours has flexibility/computation as the primary pair.

The thing about bureaucracies is that they are just smart enough to be the preferred problem-solving mechanism where available, by covering a few default cases well, but not smart enough to run the world without human intelligence working relentlessly as a backstop.