In the opening chapter of The Case for Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out, Lindsay Crouse uses her own life as a case study in determination. “It’s not a memoir,” she explains, brimming with energy over a long, cheery video call. “But I am trying to write with a certain degree of personal authority . . . on the subject of perseverance.”
Crouse’s hard work carried her from her small Rhode Island hometown to Harvard, where she excelled as a student and cross-country runner. She moved to New York City after graduation, and in 2011, landed a job as an assistant at the New York Times. Within a few years, she was producing short documentaries and writing about endurance sports. She pursued stories celebrating the triumph of tenacity: One piece profiled Shalane Flanagan, who became the first woman in decades to win the New York City marathon. Crouse’s films won Emmys, Peabodys and an Oscar. In her scant spare time, she ground out ever faster times as a competitive marathoner, gritting her teeth through performance plateaus and injuries, and at 35, achieving a personal best of 2:53. “For much of my life,” she writes, “perseverance worked.”
“I can make anything work for a really, really long time. And I don’t do the harder thing of asking whether or not I truly still should.”
But as she racked up successes, her reporting began to explore darker aspects of our culture’s winners-never-quit ethos. In 2019, she published a bombshell short doc and opinion piece on Mary Cain, a young track star who joined Nike’s elite running team and was bullied by its coach into losing a dangerous amount of weight. After suffering bone fractures and suicidal thoughts, Cain left the team. And in an opinion piece supporting Simone Biles’ decision to bow out of the Tokyo Olympics, Crouse wrote: “Biles joins a growing number of younger athletes . . . who are pushing against the traditional American narrative of gold at all costs, including the expense of their own mental or physical health.”
Meanwhile, Crouse was questioning the costs of her own unquenchable thirst to log faster miles and tick off career milestones. In her 2021 essay “What I’ve Learned From Running Marathons,” she described that craving for escalating markers of achievement as an addictive “hedonic treadmill” that rewards success with a dopamine hit. She was starting to grasp that the treadmill just keeps accelerating, and the dopamine rewards keep tapering off.
Other factors conspired to push Crouse toward a reckoning: She got pregnant. And she was utterly exhausted. She recalls a week when she was moderating panels, reporting on the NYC marathon and polishing the Mary Cain video, all while logging 97 marathon training miles. “That’s when I started to realize, ‘No, I have too much,’ ” she says. “ ‘I think I need to stop it.’ ”
In 2021, Crouse poured that rethinking into a five-minute short doc titled, “It’s Quitting Season.” The video opens with talking heads roasting Simone Biles for withdrawing from the Olympics, then cuts to Crouse against a gold backdrop: “We demonize quitters. We think they’re pathetic,” she says, between ad and movie clips glorifying grit.
“What if sometimes quitting isn’t cowardly at all, but smart?” she counters, arguing against sticking out dead-end jobs and unhappy relationships because we’re conditioned to believe that giving up equals failing. The video closes with Crouse’s voice-over and full screen, all caps text: “DON’T BE A MARTYR TO GRIT.”
The film struck a nerve. Quitting was already on people’s minds. The Great Resignation was getting underway. Crouse’s agents reached out. “You’ve got to write this book,” they told her.
Crouse sold the book proposal and went on leave from the Times to write The Case for Quitting, an exploration of our culture’s obsession with persistence at any cost. She expanded on the themes in the “quitting season” video with additional reporting, scientific research and case studies. Ultimately, she envisioned the book as a sort of guide: how to tell whether we’re striving for something that will truly enrich our lives or just mindlessly persevering, as if struggle were its own moral imperative. “Those same impulses that can lead us to achieve . . . this drive or ambition, it can flip, and it can start to take us down,” she says. “It’s up to us to moderate that impulse, or we’ll never live the kind of actualized, happy and perhaps successful lives that we wanted to in the first place.”
Crouse had the perfect subject to illustrate this idea: Keira D’Amato, an elite marathoner whose dedication to qualifying for the Olympics spurred her to keep pushing through worsening injuries and pain. D’Amato couldn’t fathom giving up on this dream: Who would she even be if not Keira the Future Olympian? How would she spend her days, if not on training and racing?
Sheer will had never failed D’Amato—until it did. No amount of effort would make her ankle heal. Finally, she gave up competitive running. It hurt, but she was also flooded with relief. “It was a revelation to realize I could quit and be okay,” D’Amato told Crouse.
Quitting wasn’t the end of her story; it was a new beginning. After taking eight years to live a different life—real estate job, marriage, motherhood—D’Amato started jogging again. No pressure, no goals. And then, to her surprise, she came roaring back. At 35, she qualified for the Olympic Marathon trials; and at 37, she broke the American women’s record at the Houston Marathon.
“This drive or ambition, it can flip, and it can start to take us down.”
“She was always this North Star athlete to me,” Crouse says. She bookends The Case for Quitting with D’Amato’s story because, to her, it’s “the consummate example of how stepping back and giving up, in fact, can actually help propel us further.”
A caveat: Crouse is not advocating quitting as a “success hack,” but as a sane alternative to striving for impossible goals, or to never asking ourselves why we’re reaching for them in the first place. Some of the most revealing anecdotes are about successful people who chose to step off the treadmill—like soul and R&B artist Bill Withers, who walked away from the music industry at the height of his fame. “I like being my own man,” he said. And like Bernard Moitessier, who abandoned a round-the-world, single-handed sailing race while in first place. Before changing course, he explained his decision in a message he slingshotted onto a ship near Cape Town: “Because I am happy at sea, and perhaps also to save my soul.”
Not everybody can just walk away from a career, a marriage, a mortgage. Crouse gets that. But in The Case for Quitting, she urges us to subtract the societal pressure to persist for persistence’s sake and consider all available choices. Writing the book gave her the courage to do exactly that. “It really forced me to confront certain pathologies I’d had,” she says. “I can make anything work for a really, really long time. And I don’t do the harder thing of asking whether or not I truly still should.”
After much soul searching, Crouse left the New York Times in January after 15 years. Some people might call that quitting. She thinks of it as launching an exciting entrepreneurial chapter of her career, where the things she creates—including this book—truly belong to her. Her dream for the book isn’t to tell people how to live their lives, but “to be a peer to them and talk about these ideas,” she tells me, nodding enthusiastically as I share my own personal stories. “I get so energized by hearing other people’s takes.”
And she’s running again for the fun of it, not to win races.
“It is a life,” she writes, “where I decide.” It’s not a speeding treadmill, but a small, highly maneuverable craft—an instrument of exploration—and Crouse is at the helm. She’s not sure exactly where it’s headed. But for the first time in years, that’s a thrilling prospect.
Photo of Lindsay Crouse by Sophie Sahara.
Read our review of The Case for Quitting by Lindsay Crouse.