Knowing when to end something

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How do you know when it's time to end something (like a job, an activity, a friendship, a relationship?)

When I get really frustrated or impatient, or overwhelmed, I tend to want to end anything that is stressing me out. Most times I don't regret it later on, it turns out to be the right decision. But with a few things, I have regretted it.

I find that for me when I get stressed out about something I just want to run from it. I have made some rash decisions before and they have been the wrong one. Sometimes it is best to think about what is really going on and think about things and if you have someone to bounce things against then possibly get other input. If it is best for you to end things then go with it.

For example I got freaked out about a job once and left in under a year when I was under contract. In looking back this was really really bad but it didn't have a negative impact on me and worked out fine.

With other people I have shut them out of my life when I wouldn't have had to.

I don't think it's possible to know when to end something. It's usually a gamble. With activities and friendships you can often compromise and just reduce the involvement, but that's not often possible with jobs and relationships. I would have liked to reduce my working hours, but the deal was full time or nothing. I chose full time until I could afford to choose nothing, and that was a very long wait.

When the negatives consistently vastly outweigh the positives. I don't think that'd apply to jobs, though haha.

I have a tendency to prematurely end relationships or discontinue regular activities when faced with adversity. It's usually a 50/50 chance that I'll come to regret the decision in some way. Usually I regret it immediately if I'm going to be regretting it at all.

Last edited by Logston on 19 Feb 2015, 4:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'd like to be better at making these kind of judgements, if I'm unsure about the right course of action, I end something when it becomes blatantly obvious that I should.

You don't really know, and it is this uncertainty that is particularly hard for us aspies to cope with.

An NT would simply go with their intuition which results in a specific feeling emerging from their unconscious minds into their conscious awareness.

We aspies have intuitions too, but I believe that generally speaking, we do not trust them.
We know from experience that sometimes the tiniest addition of new relevant information can change the entire outcome of an intuition, with us often not understanding exactly why/how it happened. And we usually want to know why and understand the process that results in some major life decision.


I see the main difference being that our conscious thought is a learned and formal logical binary reasoning process that we trust to be "reasonable" and reliable.

I believe that the subconscious thought uses quantum probability calculations instead. It would explain several characteristics of the subconscious, not the least of which is that processing speed/power is many times faster than our conscious though.

We aspies generally trust our subconscious to handle physical things like body movements, such as riding a bicycle, but not with formal logic type decisions.

I know this is one of my ideas that some thing is pretty "out there" or a load of crap, but I have put a lot of thought into it and I think I have good reasons for believing this way. I spend a lot of time thinking about thinking, - metacognition.

I believe that we filter information coming from our subconscious in ways that NTs generally do not.
I believe that different types of uncertainties are handled different ways as a result of this filtering.

For me, a physical (real) uncertainty such as determining how to catch a ball in flight is handled subconsciously without a lot of extra filtering. But, a conceptual uncertainty is very heavily filtered by conscious thought, being run through a very rigorous set of formal logic conditionals.

Does this make sense to you?

I know I have this tendency to be impulsive and just end things and sometimes I do really regret it. Maybe I also see reasons why it really was the right thing to do. But that doesn't make it hurt any less.

Deep down I have this constant wish that I could just pack a bag and literally walk away from everything and everyone I know. Just disappear forever and ever and ever. I am so sick of it all.

I have had the same feeling many times.
For me, I don't think it's so much the people, but more the mind viruses that they host.

Sometimes the right decision will hurt anyway. In situations where there is some pain either way you go, then it's a given.

Yes. I completely agree with this.

There are some people that I really like, or I may really care for them and love them, but just I cannot stand the way they think. It's something about the way their inner thought processes and their ideas come out in their behavior. It totally creeps me out. It really does give me the feeling almost like they have a nasty, infectious disease and I just want to get as far away from them as possible.

Yep! memes are incredibly powerful.
I think a good analogy is a computer virus infecting robots and causing them to behave differently.
It seems clear to us that they are being controlled by some outside malicious logic.

Great quote:

If you have to make a decision, you're not ready to.

You'll know it's time to end something when you've ended it.

Yes, OMG, exactly. And it is so clear to me that is what is happening. But they don't see it that way. They believe they are acting purely on their own volition.

Like in a job for instance, you can see how some of the people in the company get totally sucked up into the hive mind consciousness of that company. It's like they can't even think or speak for themselves anymore. They just endlessly parrot what they've been told by the people above them. If you introduce an idea that is outside of that, it's like they can't even recognize or process the information. It does not compute.

I feel like I just can't interface very well with people who act like that. I think of most social groups, all kinds of groups, as being very cult-like. I know the way I usually see a group, is probably very different than the way those people see themselves. To me they are not just a group of like-minded individuals, it looks like they are functioning as a hive consciousness, like there is one unified entity behind all their thought processes. A friend of mine used to call that "the borg."

Most people are either not aware of or unable to admit the extent to which their beliefs are the result of indoctrination by the institutions of society and their representatives, and not the result of knowledge that they have validated first hand.

The analogy with the borg is quite fitting. There seem to be very few exceptions to 'borg' culture.

One exception is possible the culture promoted by the founder of Honda. It may of course not be alive in all divisions of Honda, and may have been contorted over time, but this is quite interesting (extract from http://www.strategy-business.com/article/00269?pg=all):

Embracing Paradox

Soichiro Honda famously said that success is 99 percent failure. And, in fact, Honda’s spontaneous, open meetings may have little value half the time, and often appear to be a waste of resources. But on the whole, in Honda Motor’s experience, waigaya leads directly to significant improvements in productivity, process, systems, and performance that would otherwise have been absent.

As an offspring of Soichiro Honda’s unstructured management and cultural style—which is best exemplified by his insistence that Honda employees favor unorthodoxy over imitation—waigaya comes in many forms. It can be a half-hour meeting on a specific problem that needs to be addressed immediately, or it can be a series of sessions that go on for weeks or months about a new factory under development or a vehicle model upgrade. Every department at Honda practices waigaya—sales and marketing, manufacturing, maintenance. As few as three people or as many as 20 may attend.

At the heart of waigaya is a single concept: Paradoxes and disagreements are the essence of continuous improvement. Most companies are afraid of such dualities, but opposing concepts routinely alter the business equation: centralization versus decentralization, worker empowerment versus productivity, multinational control versus indigenous autonomy, disruptive innovation versus cannibalization of existing product lines, and on and on.

There is a related concept that I found in a book titled Immunity to Change called optimal conflict that refers to a state of mind that creates an optimal context for learning.

Optimal conflict is defined as...
- the persistent experience of some frustration, dilemma, life puzzle, quandary, or personal problem that is …
- perfectly designed to cause us to feel the limits of our current ways of knowing …
- in some sphere of our living that we care about, with …
- sufficient supports so that we are neither overwhelmed by the conflict nor able to escape of diffuse it.

I instinctively favour unorthodoxy over imitation, and from my perspective life is full of paradoxes that keep me awake during the day, and often at night.

I am pretty well spot-on in knowing when to end something; whether or not I do is another matter entirely.

I also favor innovation over imitation, BUT at the same time I do not favor uncertainty, or change in general.

To end something is a change, and so introduces levels of uncertainty.

Perhaps the important factor is that I do not dislike ALL change. It's just that I know that the vast majority of change results in situations becoming worse, or more complex, which most often leads to worse, or at least increased possible points of failure.
To my perspective, most changes that people label as innovation actually make situations worse.
I'm often considered a "regressive" for having this perspective of things.

But back on subject, I think the OP is talking about making a change where a clearly positive result can't be predicted using rational conscious thought.

To this I can also say this about my personal nature: I'm not much of a gambler either.
I know that most rolls of the dice results in a loss.

I agree with this. Some types of change can be positive. But more often than not, the kinds of change I like are changes that revert back to older ways of doing things. lol




Yes. I'm also talking about knowing the difference between genuinely needing to end something, vs. feeling temporarily overwhelmed by anxiety or frustration.