Doing Enough Then Walking Away

Choosing to let go in our comparison-obsessed world

Hi, before we get started on this month’s Storytelling with the Tao Te Ching, I just wanted to let you know two things.

The deadline for the 2026 Year of Mindful Writing is extended to 10th December. Apply here.

Applications are now open to work with me 1-1 in the Mindfulness Mentoring for Writers program. Applications are accepted ongoing to start at a mutually convenient time. 💙

For this chapter’s exploration I am using the translation by Ron Hogan. I really enjoy this version, which is modern, plain speaking and often makes me laugh. It’s not remotely academic or poetic but I enjoy dipping into it now and then.

Chapter Nine

If you drink too much, you get drunk.
The engine won’t start if you’re always tinkering with it.

If you hoard wealth,
you fall into its clutches.
If you crave success,
you succumb to failure.

Do what you have to do, then walk away.
Anything else will drive you nuts.

Yet more synchronicity this month and just after I have written about how comparing my writing to others made me lose my way with it, in Doing the Best We Can, the next chapter of the Tao Te Ching I’m exploring is all about craving what you don’t have and it leading to dissatisfaction with what you do.

Our modern world is designed to make us feel like we’re never enough.

Never thin enough, successful enough, productive enough. The engine of capitalism runs on comparison — you can’t sell someone something they don’t really want unless you first make them feel inadequate for not having it. Buy the bigger house. Chase the promotion. Upgrade your phone, your car, your body, your face, your life. Accumulate more, achieve more, be more. Always more.

And if you’re not doing all of that? Well, there must be something wrong with you.

I’ve lived nomadically for over thirteen years now. No fixed abode. But even before that I never stayed in one place very long. In the 27 years that my husband and I have been together, the longest we have lived in one house is 2.5 years. When people find out how we live, the reactions are interesting. Often it’s amazement, sometimes envy. “I wish I could do that,” they say. “You’re so brave.” Almost everyone says: “What will you do when you get old?” But the past decade of losing so many friends so suddenly when they were so young, showed me there is no guarantee that I will. But underneath all of the questions people do ask out loud, I can sense the unspoken ones in their heads: How do you live like that? Don’t you want security? Stability? A proper life?

The truth is, I’ve never wanted that version of life. It never felt right to me. The traditional path — the house, the career, the accumulation — I just knew it wasn’t my path. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t seen how the comparison machine operates. How it grinds people down. How it makes them crave things they don’t actually want, just because everyone else has them or because the culture says they should.

Before social media, this was already a problem. We compared ourselves to our neighbours, our siblings, our colleagues, our friends. We measured our lives against the milestones we were supposed to hit by certain ages. But social media has put the comparison trap on overdrive. Now we’re not just comparing ourselves to the people we know but to everyone, everywhere, all the time. It’s exhausting.

I fell into that trap around my writing when my first novel was published. The constant checking of stats, of who else got published where and by which publisher, who won or was shortlisted for what prize, who had more followers, who got better reviews.

But it’s not just in the writing world. It’s everywhere. Parenting, careers, holidays, homes, bodies. We’re tinkering constantly with the engine of our lives, trying to make it perform better, look better, be better, and in the process, we’re often making ourselves sad as we feel less than.

Ron Hogan’s translation of Chapter 9 puts it plainly: “If you’re always tinkering with it, the engine won’t start.”

This is what happens when we can’t stop comparing and adjusting and trying to upgrade ourselves according to external standards. We lose touch with what actually matters to us. We lose the ability to do what needs doing and walk away. We get trapped in an endless cycle of craving and dissatisfaction.

“If you hoard wealth, you fall into its clutches. If you crave success, you succumb to failure.”

The hoarding isn’t just about money. It’s about accumulating credentials, achievements, possessions, followers, validation. Hoarding anything we think will finally make us enough. And the craving isn’t just about wanting success — it’s about needing external proof of our worth.

“Do what you have to do, then walk away. Anything else will drive you nuts.”

This might be the most practical, liveable wisdom in the entire Tao Te Ching. It’s the one that enabled me to see that I was caught in the trap of craving and comparison around my writing, and it showed me I could also choose to step out of it.

Whatever your work is, do it. Share it. Then let it go. Live your life according to your own values, not the metrics of social media or the expectations of your family or culture. The comparison machine will keep running. The capitalist machine will keep telling you you’re not enough. But you don’t have to participate. You can choose to walk away.

This is what this chapter taught me.

Reading

Hot Spot by Nora Lange

Click here to read it in The New Yorker

Photo by Arnaud Padallé on Unsplash

Synopsis

An unnamed, unemployed writer lives in a tiny Brooklyn studio while her successful older brother in his New Jersey palace pays her rent and phone bill and sends her lemons so she won’t get scurvy. During their weekly check-in calls, he scolds her about not finding work. She should be applying for jobs. Meanwhile, desire rashes begin appearing on her body — pink and auburn splotches that spread as she sits at her desk with dozens of browser tabs open, “indications of potential.”

The sister insists she’s working on an essay for a prestigious magazine whose editor she’s been flirting with online. The brother suggests elder care jobs. She resists, but she knows she’s in no position to lose his financial support. A friend stops by, notices the rashes spreading up her neck, and drags her out to a bar where happy hour no longer exists and the free popcorn now costs three dollars.

The brother arrives unannounced with duffel bags. He’s hungry, needs a shower, wants to hear about the essay. She loves him but knows she’ll never be free from “the debilitating trap of debt that existed between them.” A desire rash creeps into her mouth. She lets it. Her entire person becomes a single hot spot on her own terms.

When the brother returns from his shower, the sister is gone. In her place is “a pulsating, hot-to-the-touch shape that continued to expand.”

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I chose this story because Nora Lange captures something deeply disturbing about our modern world: what happens when we become nothing but our desires, when craving consumes us so completely that we vanish into it.

The sister and brother represent two versions of the trap this chapter warns against. The brother has accumulated everything — the New Jersey palace, the important job he can’t even explain, the wife and four children, all the trappings. But he’s miserable. His body is failing him (he needs hair and penis-enhancement medications). He works countless hours. He’s trapped by what he’s hoarded.

The sister is caught in a different trap: craving validation from the prestigious magazine editor, craving the artist’s life that keeps slipping away from her, craving freedom from debt while remaining dependent. She’s tinkering constantly — dozens of browser tabs open, job searches, flirtation, the promise of an essay she might write. But nothing starts. The engine won’t turn over.

The desire rashes are the story’s brilliant physical manifestation of what craving does to us. They start small — one knee, then the other. They spread as she sits at her desk not working, not applying for jobs, not doing anything except wanting. By the end, the rash has consumed her entirely. She’s no longer a person, just “a pulsating, hot-to-the-touch shape.”

The story doesn’t moralise or explain. Lange simply shows us the horror of consumption by desire. The sister becomes pure wanting. A hot spot. Something that exists only to transmit, to serve others’ needs while depleting herself completely.

It’s a perfect metaphor for how we’re expected to live in modern capitalism: always available, always productive, always on. Using ourselves up in service of the machine while craving the validation that will prove we’re enough.

What makes the story so powerful is that Lange offers no solutions, no way out. The sister has vanished. The brother will probably leave the pulsating shape behind and return to his palace. Neither of them knew how to do what needed doing and walk away.

But we can all learn. That’s the wisdom this chapter offers. We can recognise when we’re caught in the trap of craving and comparison. We can stop tinkering with the engine long enough to actually start it. We can choose what’s enough rather than constantly reaching for more.

We can refuse to become hot spots — depleting ourselves to serve everyone else’s needs while our own unrealised desires consume us from the inside out.

Please do let me know in the comments, or by replying to the email, your thoughts and feelings about this story; and how it ties into this interpretation of the Tao Te Ching for storytelling.

Your Turn: Writing Prompts

• Write a character who is consumed by a single desire or craving. Show it physically manifesting in some way (like the desire rashes). What do they become when the craving takes over completely?

• Create a scene where a character can’t stop tinkering with something — a project, a plan, a relationship. Will there be a moment when they realise the tinkering itself is preventing them from moving forward? Or will the tinkering keep them trapped?

• Write about two characters who represent opposite traps: one who has accumulated everything, one who is consumed by craving what they don’t have. Put them in a room together. What happens?

I’d love to hear what comes up for you with these prompts if you’d like to share in the comments.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s Storytelling with the Tao Te Ching. You can read other posts in this series here.

With love,

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