What you gain when you give up

After his airplane was shot down over North Vietnam, Admiral James Stockdale underwent seven years of isolation and torture. Stockdale, however, was trained as much in Western philosophy as military strategy. Once freed, Stockdale explained that he survived and kept his sanity because he gave up on the idea of ever being rescued. He instead accepted his conditions as the new normal. As Stockdale saw it, he was essentially testing Epictetus‘s Stoic doctrines in a laboratory of human behavior, which is the subtitle of his book. Yet, look up Stockdale online and you‘ll find that almost everyone now denatures what he had to say. Stockdale explicitly says that he thrived by letting go of hope. Few people, however, are prepared to hear/accept this. They instead hold that he thrived by never letting go of hope. This certainly sounds good. However, what if one of the brutal facts requiring confrontation is that you won’t prevail in the end, regardless of what you do? This is the possibility I want to explore.