Dedicated

The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing

Pete Davis

• Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781982140922
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Mental Health & Wellbeing

A profoundly inspiring and transformative argument that purposeful commitment and civic engagement can be a powerful force in today's age of restlessness and indecision. Most of us have had this experience: browsing through countless options on Netflix, unable to commit to watching any given movie—and losing so much time skimming reviews and considering trailers that it's too late to watch anything at all. In a book inspired by an idea first articulated in a viral commencement address, Pete Davis argues that this is the defining characteristic of the moment: keeping our options open. We are stuck in "Infinite Browsing Mode"—swiping through endless dating profiles without committing to a single partner, jumping from place to place searching for the next big thing, and refusing to make any decision that might close us off from an even better choice we imagine is just around the corner. This culture of restlessness and indecision, Davis argues, is causing tension in the lives of young people today: We want to keep our options open, and yet we yearn for the purpose, community, and depth that can only come from making deep commitments.In Dedicated, Davis examines this quagmire, as well as the counterculture of committers who have made it to the other side. He shares what we can learn from the "long-haul heroes" who courageously commit themselves to particular places, professions, and causes—who relinquish the false freedom of an open future in exchange for the deep fulfillment of true dedication. Weaving together examples from history, personal stories, and applied psychology, Davis's "insightful without being preachy…guide to commitment should be on everyone's reading list" ( Booklist, starred review).

I. INFINITE BROWSING MODE

1 Two Cultures

Infinite Browsing Mode

You’ve probably had this experience: It’s late at night and you start browsing Netflix, looking for something to watch. You scroll through different titles, you watch a couple of trailers, you even read a few reviews—but you just can’t commit to watching any given movie. Suddenly it’s been thirty minutes and you’re still stuck in Infinite Browsing Mode, so you just give up. You’re too tired to watch anything now, so you cut your losses and fall asleep.

I’ve come to believe that this is the defining characteristic of my generation: keeping our options open.

The Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman has a great phrase for what I’m talking about: liquid modernity. We never want to commit to any one identity or place or community, Bauman explains, so we remain like liquid, in a state that can adapt to fit any future shape. And it’s not just us—the world around us remains like liquid, too. We can’t rely on any job or role, idea or cause, group or institution to stick around in the same form for long—and they can’t rely on us to do so, either. That’s liquid modernity: It’s Infinite Browsing Mode, but for everything in our lives.

For many people I know, leaving home and heading out into the world was a lot like entering a long hallway. We walked out of the room in which we grew up and into this world with hundreds of different doors to infinitely browse. And I’ve seen all the good that can come from having so many new options. I’ve seen the joy a person feels when they find a “room” more fitting for their authentic self. I’ve seen big decisions become less painful, because you can always quit, you can always move, you can always break up, and the hallway will always be there. And mostly I’ve seen the fun my friends have had browsing all the different rooms, experiencing more novelty than any generation in history has ever experienced.

But over time, I started seeing the downsides of having so many open doors. Nobody wants to be stuck behind a locked door—but nobody wants to live in a hallway, either. It’s great to have options when you lose interest in something, but I’ve learned that the more times I jump from option to option, the less satisfied I am with any given option. And lately, the experiences I crave are less the rushes of novelty and more those perfect Tuesday nights when you eat dinner with the friends who you have known for a long time—the friends you have made a commitment to, the friends who will not quit you because they found someone better.

The Counterculture of Commitment

As I have grown older, I have become more and more inspired by the people who have clicked out of Infinite Browsing Mode—the people who’ve chosen a new room, left the hallway, shut the door behind them, and settled in.

It’s the television pioneer Fred Rogers recording 895 episodes of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood because he was dedicated to advancing a more humane model of children’s television. It’s the Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day sitting with the same outcast folks night after night because it was important that someone was committed to them. It’s Martin Luther King Jr.—and not just the Martin Luther King Jr. who confronted the fire hoses in 1963 but also the Martin Luther King Jr. who hosted his thousandth tedious planning meeting in 1967.

As this new type of hero captured my admiration, I started appreciating a different constellation of figures from my childhood than I did at the end of my teenage years. The “cool teachers” faded in my memory—I can’t even remember some of their names—but the slow-and-steady ones have lingered.

There was the intimidating stage crew and robotics director from my high school, Mr. Ballou, who built up a student cult of misfit tinkerers and future engineers. He seemed to have a whole wing of the school to himself filled with half-built projects, technology from various decades, and devoted student acolytes clad in matching black T-shirts. Most of the school, myself included, were a bit afraid of him—scared we would get in his way, or worse, break something. But that was the key to his method. If you were willing to face your fears and engage with him, he would train you in any one of the dozens of craft skills he knew.

One time, I made a funny video with my friends for a school variety show. He saw it and told me that I had “absolutely no sense of framing”—and that the video wasn’t good enough yet to show to a crowd. My other teachers, just delighted that a student was making something, had always heaped praise on my teenage filmmaking. Mr. Ballou was different. He insisted that if you were going to get into a craft, you should hone it. I remember complaining that he was being a little hard on me.

But the Ballou method cut both ways. Another time, I had the idea of building a concert venue inside the school’s junior courtyard. Every teacher thought the idea was ridiculous—What the heck are you even talking about? But when I told Mr. Ballou, he wasn’t taken aback at all. If I learned the engineering software AutoCAD and designed a blueprint, he told me, he would help me advocate for building it. That’s a real teacher—demanding more of you but committing to you if you commit to learning.

I took piano lessons from Mrs. Gatley, who clocked four decades in the same chair next to the same grand piano in her living room on Oak Street. While my other friends got to bop in and out of lessons, one or two years at a time, and learn whichever songs they wanted (Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” and Coldplay’s “Clocks” were my era’s songs), Mrs. Gatley was old school. It wasn’t just that her students had to learn their scales and play classical music. By taking lessons with Mrs. Gatley, you were signing up to join an entire immersive experience that was bigger than piano—and bigger than you.

Just taking weekly lessons wasn’t allowed—you had to follow the full Gatley calendar with all her other students. There was the fall recital and the Christmas concert, the sonatina festival and the June recital—and each of these events had a corresponding gathering preceding them where every student would prepare together. You had to learn the history of the pianoforte, the difference between the Baroque and the Romantic periods, and the proper way to bow after finishing playing.

You also couldn’t really quit. Once, in middle school, I asked Mrs. Gatley if I could take a year off.

“You can, I guess,” she responded, “but we don’t really take a year off here.”

I ended up spending twelve years in the Gatleyverse. As a result, I learned about a lot more than just piano in Mrs. Gatley’s living room. I saw what it was like to watch older students play some impossible song—and eventually learn to play it myself. Because Mrs. Gatley knew me for so long, she had the insight and authority to give deeper advice than other teachers, like when she told me: “You move a little fast in life; you might feel better if you slowed down.” And when my dad died, it meant something that Mrs. Gatley—who knew him from all the concerts over the years—came to the funeral. You couldn’t get that from some one-off teacher who let you play “A Thousand Miles” during the first lesson and quit the first time you got bored.

Folks such as Mrs. Gatley and Mr. Ballou—and icons like Dorothy Day, Fred Rogers, and Martin Luther King Jr.—aren’t just a random assortment of people. I’ve come to think about them as part of a shared counterculture—a Counterculture of Commitment. All of them took the same radical act of making commitments to particular things—to particular places and communities, to particular causes and crafts, and to particular institutions and people.

I say “counterculture” because this is not what today’s dominant culture pushes us to do. The dominant culture pushes us to build our résumés and not get tied down to a place. It pushes us to value abstract skills that can be applied anywhere, rather than craft skills that might help us do only one thing well. It tells us to not get too sentimental about anything. It’s better, this culture tells us, to stay distant—just in case that thing is sold off or bought out, downsized, or made “more efficient.” It tells us to not hold true to anything too seriously—and to not be surprised when others don’t, either. Above all, it tells us to keep our options open.

The kinds of people I’m talking about here are rebels. They live their lives in defiance of this dominant culture.

They’re citizens—they feel responsible for what happens to society.

They’re patriots—they love the places where they live and the neighbors who populate those places.

They’re builders—they turn ideas into reality over the long haul.

They’re stewards—they keep watch over institutions and communities.

They’re artisans—they take pride in their craft.

And they’re companions—they give time to people.

They build relationships with particular things. And they show their love for those relationships by working at them for a long time—by closing doors and forgoing options for their sake.

When Hollywood tells tales of courage, they usually take the form of “slaying the dragon”—there’s a bad guy and a big moment where a brave knight makes a definitive decision to risk everything to win some victory for the people. It’s the man standing in front of the tank, or the troops storming up the hill, or the candidate giving the perfect speech at the perfect time.

But what I’ve learned from these long-haul heroes is that this isn’t the only valor around. It’s not even the most important type of heroism for us to model, because most of us don’t have to face many dramatic, decisive moments in our lives—at least not ones that spring up out of nowhere. Most of us just confront daily life: normal morning after normal morning, where we can decide to start working on something or keep working at something—or not. That’s what life tends to give us: not big, brave moments, but a stream of little, ordinary ones out of which we must make our own meaning.

The heroes of the Counterculture of Commitment—through day-in, day-out, year-in, year-out work—become the dramatic events themselves. The dragons that stand in their way are the everyday boredom and distraction and uncertainty that threaten sustained commitment. And their big moments look a lot less like sword-waving and a lot more like gardening.

The tension

This book is about the tension between these two cultures: the Culture of Open Options and the Counterculture of Commitment. This tension—between browsing the hallway and settling into a room, between keeping our options open and becoming long-haul heroes—exists both inside ourselves as individuals and in society as a whole.

You can find examples of young people acting like browsers all around us. We have trouble committing to relationships, endlessly swiping through potential partners. We uproot ourselves often, jumping from place to place searching for the next best thing. Some of us don’t commit to a career path because we’re worried that we will be stuck doing something that doesn’t quite fit our true self. Others of us are forced from job to job by a precarious economy. For many of us, it’s a little bit of both.

We tend to distrust organized religion, political parties, the government, corporations, the press, the medical and legal systems, nations, ideologies—pretty much every major institution—and we are averse to associating publicly with any of them. Meanwhile, our media—books, news, entertainment—keeps getting shorter and shorter. And it’s not just because we have low attention spans but because we have low commitment spans, too.

But when you look at what we have real affection for—whom we admire, what we respect, and what we remember—it’s rarely the institutions and people who come from the Culture of Open Options. It’s the master committers we love. In our own lives, we keep swiping through potential partners, but when there’s a story online about an elderly couple celebrating their seventieth anniversary, we eat it up. In our own lives, we uproot often, but we line up to get into those famous corner pizza joints and legendary diners that have been around for fifty years. We like our tweets and videos short, yet we also listen to three-hour interview podcasts, binge eight-season fantasy shows, and read long-form articles that comprehensively explain how, say, shipping containers or bird migration works.

You couldn’t ask a dozen random young infinite browsers what their most cherished memories are without hearing a few mentions of summer camp. Talk about a counterculture of commitment: Camps are fixed communities imbued with decades of heritage, filled with songs and traditions repeated over and over again, and staffed by a chain of generations between campers and the counselors they eventually become. Even the whole premise of summer camp—that you commit to staying in this place for a few weeks with the same group of people, usually without your phone—is at odds with keeping your options open.

In sports, it’s not the one-off moments that are being remembered most these days—it’s the epic careers and dynasties. It’s Michael Jordan’s Bulls, Tom Brady’s Patriots, and Michael Phelps’s twenty-eight Olympic medals. It’s why Serena Williams and Tiger Woods are the most talked-about athletes of the twenty-first century. There’s nothing more epic than watching someone grow up and so consistently sustain global excellence in a craft for decades.

As everything dissolves around us, we grasp for anything to hold on to that’s more enduring, more meaningful, more hefty than (to borrow a Paul Simon lyric) the “staccato signals of constant information” that fill the digital age. You can see it in the personal DNA kit and genealogy boom, which are driven by our desire to place our lives in a larger historic story. And you can see it in the broader cultural nostalgia boom, in which nineties cover bands, vinyl records, old typewriters, Polaroid cameras, throwback corporate logos and jerseys, and retro fiction, from Mad Men to Stranger Things, have all blossomed in the past decade. The songwriter Joe Pug asks the right question: “You can call that man history who lives in the past, but can you blame him for asking for something to last?”

At its sweetest and most intimate, we feel this tension in our relationships. We want to go out into the world and have big adventures, but deep down, many of us also dream of just living in the same neighborhood with our best friends. And despite all the dissolution—despite all the preference for novelty over depth, individuality over community, flexibility over purpose—our culture still holds marriage and parenthood as sacred, the last of a dying breed of common commitments.

The tension makes sense. You start missing something as soon as it’s mostly gone—and then you hold on to the surviving examples as precious. “As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe,” the nun at the end of Don DeLillo’s White Noise tells the commitmentless Jack Gladney. “Wild-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks who do not speak. We are left to believe. Fools, children. Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us.” The historian Marcus Lee Hansen recalled a similar theme in his “principle of third-generation interest”: “What the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember.” But despite all our love and appreciation for the master committers who remain, many of us still can’t make the jump to being committers ourselves. It’s our version of the St. Augustine line: “I want to commit, but not just yet.”

What accounts for this hesitation? Why do we love committers but act like browsers? I think it’s because of three fears. First, we have a fear of regret: we worry that if we commit to something, we will later regret having not committed to something else. Second, we have a fear of association: we think that if we commit to something, we will be vulnerable to the chaos that that commitment brings to our identity, our reputation, and our sense of control. Third, we have a fear of missing out: we feel that if we commit to something, the responsibilities that come with it will prevent us from being everything, everywhere, to everyone.

Because of these fears, the tension sticks around. We act like browsers, we love committers, and we’re too scared to make the jump—so we’re stuck. That tension, on the individual and collective level, is the point of the departure for this book.

Resolving the tension

But this book is not just about a diagnosis—it also has an affirmative agenda. It’s about helping us resolve the tension between browsing and committing—and to do so in a just way. I say “just” because there are forces that are trying to resolve this tension through exclusion or oppression. There are people who tell us to escape the tension by turning back the clock to a time of involuntary commitments. “If only we returned to that glorious age where there were fewer choices about who and what to be,” they argue, “then we’ll feel good again.” And there are other people who aren’t looking backward to an ideal past but rather promising an ideal future where all uncertainties will be ironed out—by force, if necessary. This is what we get with cultish zealots of all stripes: an overdose of heavy meaning to combat a meaningless world.

Most of us are rightly skeptical of those who want to turn back the clock to a faux Eden or speed it up to bring about someone else’s idea of utopia. But we struggle to put forth a positive alternative to these compelling paths. And as we wait for one to emerge, we are left with the status quo—of Infinite Browsing Mode, of the hallway, of keeping our options open.

But this Culture of Open Options is not a neutral holding pattern. It’s a culture that arranges our economy against loyalty to particulars: particular neighborhoods, particular people, particular missions. It’s...