If somebody goes to war against you, it's usually because they want something specific. Assuming that something is not your complete and total extinction, it might be some of the land you live on, some resources you control, access to a holy place, régime change, you name it. Whatever it is the enemy wants, if you fight back at all it's because you want to keep it badly enough to fight: you judged the cost of fighting to be less than the cost of giving it up. But if the war grinds on and it gradually becomes clear you're losing, that judgment has to be re-evaluated: as the enemy, through superior numbers, weaponry or strategy, manages to make the cost of waging the war continually increase, you eventually reach a point at which it costs you less to just let them have what they want than to carry on fighting. At this point surrender is the sensible option: just give them what they're after, in the hope that they'll at least stop hitting you.

That's the rational view. Emotionally, surrender is a state of mind; you just feel ready to give in, tired of fighting. It's the emotion diametrically opposed to stubbornness; a willingness to follow the path of least resistance, no matter what implications it has for your moral integrity, your pride or your rational best interests.

When I go to bed on a Friday night feeling more tired than I have been in weeks (owing to a hectic week of doing urgent things at work, in particular finishing up an urgent project and finding another even more urgent one taking its place, plus a night of total insomnia in the middle of all that), and then I fail to get to sleep at all until nearly 2am and wake up at seven with absolutely no prospect of dropping back off, still tired but no longer the least bit sleepy … I start to have that feeling of surrender. Whatever impish agency in my mind determines my sleep cycle, it is clearly waging some sort of war against me, and right now I feel as if I should just give it whatever it's after so it'll at least stop doing this to me. Whatever it wants from me, it can't be as bad as having this happen to me on a semi-regular basis.

Almost more frustrating than having it working against me in the first place is the fact that my sleep cycle isn't a rational general; its hostile actions against me are without objective; there is nothing I can offer it which will make it stop. When I have that feeling of surrender deep in my bones, there is no path of lesser resistance than the one I'm already taking, and I really wish there were.