How much does completionism govern your behavior?

Seeing books & shows & relationships & jobs through when your heart's just not in it

When was the last time you quit a book? For me, it was about a year ago, 18 percent of the way through John Banville’s The Untouchable—according to my Kindle. I couldn’t tell you why I quit it. I didn’t really have a problem with the writing, or the story, or the characters. It was just the type of reading experience that felt like a slog. I’d keep eyeing how much was left in a given chapter or section. I would come to the bottom of a page only to realize I hadn’t absorbed anything on it. What can I say? I guess it just didn’t click.

This is only the second book not named Infinite Jest—as far as I can remember—that I’ve ever quit on. The other one was Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which still sits on a shelf at my parents’ house. There’s a million dollar bill bookmark sticking out of it at about the halfway mark. One of my parents—my mother, specifically—raised me with the belief that life is too short to be reading a book you don’t enjoy. I agree, but my behavior says otherwise. I’ve quit only a few books, they’re written by extremely talented and accomplished authors, and I’ll probably go back to finish them one day. It’s not like I’m buying crap and tossing it out of the window 10 pages in.

You may ask yourself: who cares, Victor? Nice humblebrag. You read books and you finish most of them. Good for you.

No! Not good for me! I’m a hopeless completionist who needs help. And if you’re someone who likes to make lists, collect experiences, and be able to (truthfully) say you’ve done things, well, perhaps you do too.

I haven’t spent much time digging into the psychology of completionist tendencies, and this article certainly isn’t meant to be a profound exploration of them. However, I do find it pretty interesting that a simple Google search of “completionism” yields a bunch of definitions and references to video games: the need to achieve every objective in a game, the overwhelming urge to find every collectible, the compulsion to tread 100 percent of all possible paths. This makes sense to me, and it feels relatively harmless. You enter a contained world and you want to spend X hours exploring all its nooks and crannies until there’s nothing novel left. You enjoy every second of it and feel that no time is wasted. More power to you.

I could also extend this sentiment to books, despite my mother’s wise words. While it’s true that I’ve stubbornly plodded my way through books that didn’t exactly light my fire, I have an opinion of them now that’s based on the works as a whole vs. an incomplete rage-quit assessment. There’s some value to that. Movies and TV shows, too. I don’t particularly take pride in being one of the probably five people that watched seasons 5-8 of Weeds, and a decade later I’m still pretty pissed off about the he’s-a-lumberjack-now finale of Dexter, but back when it was still somewhat feasible to watch every scripted TV show, these were both fun gripes about Showtime programming to have in my water cooler arsenal that otherwise wouldn’t have existed. If the network stretches 19 months of teenage cannibalism in the wilderness to 8 seasons of Yellowjackets, unfortunately I’ll probably hate-watch the final ones all the way to a bloody conclusion.

Okay. So maybe I’m doing a fair amount of self-rationalization to reframe arguably wasted time into an actually-that-binge-was-good narrative. In and of itself, that’s also probably innocuous. Where I do think the harm of completionism rears its head is when the finish line isn’t tangible or designed or (depending on your position on free will, but let’s save that rabbit hole for another time) predetermined. I’m talking relationships. Jobs. Travels. Anything that someone feels like they need to “see through” for some arbitrary sense of finality. A checked box. An item crossed off. A bucket filled all the way.

Did you have a good relationship if you knew it was over a year before it actually ended? Was it worth quiet quitting for an extra few paychecks at the job you hate just so you could list a clean 3 years on LinkedIn instead of 2.75? Was your shoestring backpacking trip to southeast Asia better because you put an extra $300 on a credit card to fly into Cambodia for two nights so that you could add it to the list of countries you’ve visited? Maybe! Maybe not. Everyone has a story they tell themselves, and diving into different rabbit holes makes sense to different people.

I ask these questions because I wonder how much we, the completionists, have our behavior governed by an invisible force that compels us to see things through for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, and according to rules that don’t actually exist. I don’t doubt that some endeavors are worth seeing through to the end—but which are those things? And why? Are they worth completing because bigger, rounder numbers are good? Because it’s best not to be seen as a quitter? By whom? Others? Ourselves? Lastly…what’s the cost of seeing things through that in hindsight you feel you should have just quit? What could, what would, what should have been filled with the time spent nobly dragging your feet to a draining conclusion?

These are impossible questions to answer—no one gets time back. Not the time they put into finishing a book so their list of reads in a given year got longer. Not the time they convinced themselves to let a relationship with a person, a corporation, an idea simply “play out” for whatever reason (perhaps legitimately!) made sense at the time. If you’re a completionist burdened by inexplicable itches that sound something like any or all of the above, I’m sorry. I wish I could tell you when it makes sense to bear down and get through something or add something to a list, and when it makes sense to cut yourself off and go be present elsewhere. Shit, I wish I could tell myself that. I guess we’ll just have to keep completing things and quitting things and find the right balance between how it all feels.

And if nothing else, at least you finished this article. Mark as read!