Writer and civic advocate Pete Davis has expanded his viral Harvard commencement address about the power of commitment into a critically-acclaimed book. In Dedicated, Davis explores the modern tension between two cultures: a Culture of Open Options and a Counterculture of Commitment. He observes that while we admire the dedication of society’s “long-haul heroes” and may even want to emulate them, certain fears keep us eternally glued to the fence. Dedicated reveals some of the drawbacks of constantly living between options without ever diving in, and shows the untapped goodness that waits for us on the other side of commitment to causes, places, and communities.

Have you ever found yourself mired in Infinite Browsing Mode? If you have any kind of streaming service you probably have: that endless vortex of searching, researching, and comparing without ever landing on something in the end.

Our culture puts a premium on "keeping our options open." It could be the defining feature of our era. The Culture of Open Options has been described in another way: It’s a “liquid modernity,” according to Polish thinker Zygmunt Bauman. That is, a state of constant flux, an inability to tether ourselves to any single identity, geographic location, or community. We keep ourselves malleable and adaptable in a world where the only constant is change and that change comes at us with growing rapidity. We don’t know what technologies or job markets will be like tomorrow, but we are anxiously eager to fit whatever mold the transient futures happen to cast. Institutions are liquid, too, and we feel we can’t count on them, but we are liquid so they also have a hard time counting on us.

Welcome to Infinite Browsing.

We can liken the modern experience to a long hallway of endless open doors, each of which leads to new experiences, new social groups, and new places. There’s something exciting about the slew of options. If you don’t like the room you’ve selected or stumbled into, you can leave, whether that room is a difficult marriage, an unfulfilling job, a toxic community, or just that gnawing restlessness for something novel. Out of the room and back into the hallway we go. Welcome back to Infinite Browsing Mode.

There are opportunities for a thousand forms of fun, but it seems we have become so afraid of getting trapped in a room that we have failed to notice how much time we spend inhabiting the hallway.

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The upsides of endless options are obvious enough: We get novelty, flexibility, and authenticity. Each door presents an opportunity to connect better with different aspects of who we are. We feel the freedom to move on when rancor with a neighbor or boss becomes unbearable.

There are, however, less-discussed downsides to endless options, like paralysis, isolation, and shallowness.

Paralysis is a major block to committing—or even making simple choices. Endless decisions lead to decision fatigue. As one economist puts it, there is a “paradox of choice” in which more choices mean more freedom, but only to a point. Eventually more is less. We become less free to choose, so stymied that we choose less often. We get worn down by hundreds of granular distinctions over the course of a day. Just think of a normal grocery run: Crunchy or smooth? Generic or brand name? Strawberry or raspberry or mixed berry? Or maybe honey? A honey substitute? Large or small? Thinkers have commented on how the endless options not only tax our will, but also our confidence in the decision we end up making. We can’t stop thinking about all the options we did not choose in the process of choosing one.

Anomie is another common downside of pursuing endless options. It refers to a structureless, isolated existence, in which a person has no standard to cling to or strive for. It comes from the Greek words meaning “no law.” It’s not just about being friendless; it’s about the pain of being free-floating and untethered from a mission-oriented community. This is what soldiers grieve when they come home from war. They go from a shared sense of purpose with a close-knit squad of comrades who will take a bullet for each other to a society that lacks and avoids that kind of committed cohesiveness. We make it seem like it’s the soldiers who have the problem by diagnosing them with depression upon returning home, but we fail to realize that American society is suffering from an acute case of anomie, and military service had provided soldiers with a cure of purpose and belonging.

Shallowness is yet another cost of buying into a Culture of Open Options. Endless options keep us fast and compulsively flitting from one thing to the next. Well over a century ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson was onto this connection between speed and superficiality when he remarked that, "In skating on thin ice, our safety is our speed.” We fear what we might encounter if we actually stopped browsing.

Sustained attention is an antidote to speedy shallowness, but modern society wars against it. Facebook once ran an ad of a young boy bored to pieces by his grandmother droning on about something, but then he opens up his Facebook app and discovers a panoply of funny videos and heart-stopping feats that provide an omnipresent reprieve from boring grandma. The messaging is pretty clear: You always have an escape from life’s dreary moments.

There are, however, heartening moments when people fight for slow and “boring.” When a McDonald’s was scheduled to open a restaurant in Rome’s culturally significant Piazza di Spagna in 1986, thousands of outraged Italians protested. One indignant Italian journalist resisted the corporate behemoth by handing out bowls of lovingly and thoughtfully crafted pasta. The protestors chanted, “We don’t want fast food, we want slow food!” The spectacle led to an internationally observed “Slow Food Day” that celebrates local culinary traditions and relishes the slow process of preparing quality food at a leisurely pace. Others have taken up the call for slowness in the intervening decades. In domains as diverse as architecture and city planning, video game production, therapy, and political forums, people are slowing things down in order to prioritize quality over quantity.

There are different kinds of valor. There’s the valor that stares down death nonchalantly as the members of the firing squad cock their rifles. There are the knights in old tales who fight tyrants or dragons. But there’s another unsung valor: the valor of making meaning out of the ordinary. This is a more neglected but desperately needed form of valor. In your life you probably won’t have more than a handful of epic dragon encounters. But you will have to get up everyday and commit to starting and continuing the pursuits you have chosen to commit to—or let them fall by the wayside. The dragons of boredom, distraction, and uncertainty often get the better of us on a daily basis.

Hollywood has conditioned us to view dragon slaying as an epic, adrenaline-soaked moment that we should aspire to. In some ways, Twitter has lowered the bar for dragon slaying: You get to stand up in the online public space, denounce the reprobate of the hour, and soak in the cheers and likes from people who think the same as you do. It’s the Hollywood-style dragon slaying victory, but way less costly.

But real, lasting change in individuals or communities comes less in those glorious climactic Hollywood moments that make us weep or cheer. Genuine change comes over a long time. Wounded relationships are not fixed in a poignant scene or two. Authentic community never happens when people pop in and out as they please.

The real dragon slayers are “long-haul heroes.” We hear a lot about sit-ins and fire hoses trained on peaceful protestors, but much less about the hundreds and hundreds of boring-but-crucial meetings that Martin Luther King Jr. attended throughout the campaign. Fred Rogers would not be so beloved if he hadn’t committed to elevating the quality of children’s television. Even decades after his final 895th episode aired, his name still evokes a smile and reminds us of the power of consistent kindness. These are the kind of people we admire, the ones we name our children after, the ones we aspire to emulate.

We find ourselves in a strange conundrum: We admire the long-haul heroes who commit to a place, a community, and a cause, and make a difference. We know we need them in this world, and part of us wants to become a long-haul hero ourselves, but something holds us back from committing.

There’s a potent trifecta of fears that get the better of any part of us that wants to leap the great divide between the Culture of Open Options and the Counterculture of Commitment. Those three fears are: fear of regret, fear of association, and fear of missing out.

The fear of regret is powerful because pursuing a course for decades and then looking back and wondering who we would be if we had chosen that other course is a wistful, painful one. It isn’t dramatic to consider deciding a kind of death. The words “homicide” and “decide” share the root “–cide,” which means  “to cut.” Deciding is an act of selecting a part and setting aside the rest. It’s a painful, bitter truth that we simply can’t be everything. Our identity is not infinite, and choice is the path to greater self-definition. By choosing, we narrow our range of options, which can burden us with a pressure to “get it right.”

Let’s ease the pressure. The highest stakes are the ones that form the fence we are sitting on. Jumping off the fence and into a commitment feels scary because we can’t see the bottom. Remember that commitments are living, organic, relational things. They are not strictly legal, transactional affairs. If they are, something has died along the way. Because commitments are living things, they are vulnerable to death. So while you don’t want to drop out of a commitment at the first sign of trouble or relational sickness, you also aren’t obligated to resuscitate something that’s died. In a strange way, becoming more comfortable with quitting is part of becoming a committer.

Another way to minimize regret is to get in touch with what you really want. Think about what makes you come alive, what you gravitate to on a regular basis. This tells you more about you than your loftiest ideals. When you think about options, don’t just think about the options themselves, but, in a moment of stillness, pay attention to yourself and what you are like when you ponder the different options. It’s something you know not just in your head or heart, but down in your guts.

Another way to identify what matters most to you is to think about your heroes. What you love in them tells you something of what matters to you. It will help you find your values more readily than beginning with abstractions like “kind” or “brave” or “generous.”

And, if those options don’t yield anything illuminating, there is always the old fashioned pros and cons list that Benjamin Franklin popularized.

Another block that we can remove is the compulsion to view options as right or wrong, as if you are taking a test. Your options are not between one choice that inexorably leads to success and the others that lead to failure and unhappiness. The future is not fixed, so your choices become part of creating a new future. Whichever choice you select, you have a say along the way in whether it becomes the best option. In some ways, the choice matters far less than being willing to commit to it. Instead of right and wrong, think of commitments as “thriving” or “languishing.”

If you are teetering on the fence, wondering whether to commit, maybe you simply need to hear: Leap!

The fear of association is another block to commitment that perceives a possible assault on identity, reputation, and control.

We fret over losing our sense of self in a group. When we hang back with these preoccupations, we are giving our current self-concepts too much power over us. When people say they are just not into long-term relationships, they are saying that long-term relationships jeopardize some aspect of their identity.

Not only does association threaten how we see ourselves, but it can also disrupt our reputation, or how others will see us. We tremble at the thought of losing control over how others perceive us. Once others know our affiliations to certain causes, organizations, or groups, the image curating process becomes impossible because it involves something bigger than just you.

Fear of association also disrupts our sense of control over our schedule, our resources, and our autonomy. By committing to something, you are committing to it—flaws and all. Communities and causes and people are messy. We can’t just accept the parts we like and cut out the rest. Friends let you down. Movements are not faction-free. Your spouse does things that annoy you.

Associations also have a way of drawing out more of us than we wish to show. They reveal strengths and talents as well as flaws and deficiencies. It takes vulnerability.

The fear of association and unwillingness to face threats to identity, reputation, and control are especially acute if we view the self as immutable and isolated. But we are not a résumé or an “About Me” page. We are dynamic human beings who discover ourselves—our true, authentic, but constantly changing selves—not by trying to remain separate and static, but through relationship. We are “embedded selves,” whose identity is not hindered but realized through our ties.

If fear of regret comes from wondering whether you committed to the right path or not, fear of missing out (or FOMO) is the worry about all the experiences you decline by sticking to your commitment. As that list of new sights and places yet to be experienced begins to stack up into the stratosphere, our commitments can feel pretty puny.

But at the heart of a severe case of FOMO is an inordinate reliance on novelty to give our lives momentum. Commitment feels like “stuckness,” like we are cutting ourselves off from movement-generating thrills. It feels like the end of life itself. But the problem with novelty is that it is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Think about how long people laughed at and talked about the very first viral YouTube videos compared to how they respond now. Longevity has dropped from months and weeks to hours and minutes.

It is tempting to approach life with what Søren Kierkegaard called the “aesthetic mode of life.” In this mode, we live life at a distance, experiencing it without ever entering into it in a meaningful, transformative way. You travel the world in the most thrilling way imaginable, but you are homeless and rootless. You surround yourself with fascinating, amusing people, but you remain unknown to them. You rely on your above-average stories of adventure and abilities to nudge you toward recognition.

The antidote to novelty is purpose. Unlike novelty, which starts exciting and becomes boring, purpose often begins boring but gains momentum and meaning over time. FOMO may not go away, but it can be transformed. As we commit to something purposeful, we realize that the experience we have been missing out on by pursuing novelty is depth, and that depth is the most thrilling experience of all. If you never pause and have a family, you miss out on a chance to bring children into the world and come to know them or cheer them on as they become their own people. If you never commit to a people and place, you miss out on a chance to become a well-respected, sought-after voice in your town.

By switching from novelty to purpose as a way to create meaning in life, we become solid people in a liquid world. Depth is a superpower that many have never tapped because they have never committed. Boredom, distraction, uncertainty, and wondering about greener grass somewhere else will be your adversaries, tempting you back to a more superficial mode of thrill-seeking, but just remember what you would miss out on if you did. As you push through, you will find that truly committed relationships to others, a sense of purpose and at-homeness, and depth are the best solutions to our fears.

These insights are just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of Dedicated here. And since we get a commission on every sale, your purchase will help keep this newsletter free.

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