The case for commitment, even when you’re scared of doing the wrong thing

The idea of committing to one thing — or a person — felt scary and overwhelming when I was younger. I delayed declaring my major in college, preferring to dip my toes into different fields of knowledge. While going to parties, I scanned the room for the next person to talk with, often looking past the person standing right in front of me. I rarely RSVP’d to invitations — what if a more exciting, worthwhile event were to come up? I had FOMO — fear of missing out — before this even was a thing. Even committing to a long board game like “Settlers of Catan” seemed like confining choice.
These memories washed over me recently when I was listening to Pete Davis, a writer and co-founder of Democracy Policy Network, make the case for commitment, and for dumping the mantra of “keeping your options open” that many millennials seem to have internalized.
Davis is the author of the book “Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing” and a co-director of “Join or Die,” a documentary about the work of social scientist and “Bowling Alone” author Robert Putnam. In 2018, Davis’s graduation speech at Harvard University, titled “A counterculture of commitment,” went viral.
Speaking at the Restore conference in Sandy, Utah, Davis said that it’s communities of committed people that could offer a solution to America’s troubled public life. “Why don’t all these silver bullets — latest politicians, latest technology — solve our problems? Well, it’s because the deepest silver bullet, the one that’s not a silver bullet at all because it takes a long time, is cultivation and culture,” Davis said. “And a place is usually thriving when it’s well cultivated. It has a living culture. There are committed people there.”
Although I’d been familiar with Davis’s ideas, his talk got me thinking about commitment in a new way and how the meaning of commitment, and how we experience it, might look different in various life stages. Despite my early resistance to commitment, I somehow managed to make some of the most important life decisions: get married, have children, settle on a fulfilling career. In fact, at the moment, I’m not looking for any more commitments. But what does it mean to remain committed to the commitments you have already made?
Davis recounted an experience when he was browsing Netflix late in the night, watching one trailer after another, only to eventually notice that 30 minutes had passed and he was too tired to watch anything. “My whole generation is stuck in indefinite browsing mode,” Davis said. He said he then began to notice that people who were making a difference in the world were engaged in specific causes — he calls them “long-haul heroes.”
“They were people who entered into relationships with particular places and institutions, with particular crafts and causes, and most importantly, with particular communities and people,” Davis said. “And they showed their love for those particular things by working at them over the long haul, by forgoing options and closing doors for their sake.”
American history is full of stories of long-haul heroism, Davis said. For instance, the Montgomery bus boycott didn’t start with a single decision by Rosa Parks. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had attended numerous committee meetings as the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in order to build trust with his congregation and the city. This investment of time cultivated relationships that sustained the yearlong bus boycott movement, sparked by Parks’ arrest. Her heroism wasn’t just a single spark on the bus, Davis said, but also involved all the preceding work “day in and day out, year in and year out … that allowed that spark to become a blaze.”
Davis parsed out two meanings of the word “dedicate.” One is to make something holy — like dedicating a cathedral or a temple. The other is to work on something for a long time. And these two meanings are interconnected. “We do something holy when we choose to commit to something,” Davis said.
While interviewing people for his book “Dedicated,” Davis learned that there are three fears standing in the way of commitment: the fear of regret that comes from not choosing something, the fear of missing out, and the fear of associating with something that will become part of our identity that we don’t have control over.
But making a commitment changes who you are: if you start cleaning a river, you become a river keeper; when you marry someone, being a spouse becomes part of your identity, Davis said. “The commitment is no longer an object you are assessing as good or bad, regrettable or not regrettable,” he said. “It becomes part of the subject.“
Davis’s advice is “jump into it” — whatever it is.
“These fears take courage to overcome. But on the other side of that courage and those fears are gifts. On the other side of our fear of regret is fiery purpose. On the other side of our fear of missing out on shallow things is not missing out on deep things. And on the other side of the fear of association is belonging, community, and with all of this joy.”
The power of these commitments comes full force when they’re shared with others through memories, inside jokes and the process of solving problems and finding solutions, Davis said. Through this process, everyone becomes a steward of the shared culture that’s at the core of the community. “What that process is that gets started when you make a commitment is a cultivation process — the creation of culture,” Davis said. Culture is not just art and music, Davis explained, but the “accrual of all the little solutions to all the problems for a community as they arise.”
For me, at least now, commitment is less about massive, life-changing decisions, but more about smaller-scale commitments. It’s about dedicating attention to small tasks and relationships that make up the larger commitments to my family and friends, my community, my work. This more dedicated attention means more careful listening, noticing and following through with actions that can bring about change for the better.
As Davis points out, through our commitments, we can create a culture in places where we go about our daily lives: where we live, where we go to school, to church, to work. “The places that are cultivated and the people that are cultivating them are making people feel less lonely and less cynical and less divided,” Davis said. “They’re making institutions more trustworthy, they’re making politics less of a mess, and they’re making hope abound.”
For even the most commitment averse among us, that’s a risk worth taking.