On Being Committed
True story: some years ago, I opened my house to a woman (and her family of five) I randomly connected with on the internet. They moved in with our family of five. Two couples and their kids, one house, one year. No, not a duplex, or an upstairs-downstairs, or anything like that. A regular “one family” home.
#tenpeopleoneshower
A few months into our experiment, we’re still adjusting, crying, rejoicing—and, oh, did we mention their newborn baby? It feels like we are walking on water, then drowning, then pulling one another up for air.
We thought our six-year-old boys would get along famously. They didn’t. We have to work at finding ways for them to connect. We thought our friends would have enough room. They didn’t. We have to reconfigure the house all over again and give them an extra bedroom. We thought it would be challenging to distribute the household labour. It isn’t. Everyone simply pitches in and the work continues to get done day after day. We weren’t sure how meal-planning would go. It turns out my friend went to culinary school and is a master strategist, so food prep and feeding the families has been streamlined and straightforward.
Little miracles happen every day. Two of us walk the kids to school in the morning after making lunches, feeding six hungry children, and helping get on dozens of pieces of snow gear. When I circle back to the house, I come home to a spotless kitchen.
It was an incredible experience, one that- even though I was very, VERY grateful to have space and quiet and privacy back again- I wouldn’t give up. But there were moments when it was, without question, extremely difficult.
We simply decided that quitting wasn’t an option. My family had extended this hospitality to my friend for the duration of her work-related stay in my city: this was her home in this time, and if we had just decided to axe it one day, it would have likely added up to horrible weeks and maybe even months of semi-homelessness and hotel stays and hurried apartment-hunting for a family of five, and no way was that going to happen.
It was as simple as that. This was what we were doing for a year, no matter what, and so it got done.
It was making the commitment itself that gave it power. If you’re committed, and you’ve formally committed yourself, you simply won’t think of quitting as soon or as often, and when you do, much more often than not, those thoughts won’t have fertile ground to linger long before flying away.
A commitment is a change in mental state. This is incredibly important to understand, because commitments are empowering, not disempowering as we’re so frequently told they are.
JOMO is, at its root, about commitments: choosing something, wholeheartedly, to the exclusion of all other possible things that overlap it.
We need to understand that our culture does not “like” commitment. We have conflated it with the loss of personal freedom, agency, and possibility. We- as a zeitgeist- have come to feel that accomplishing nothing is better than feeling “forced” to have chosen a thing to accomplish.
We’re being robbed.
People from Scandinavian countries like Denmark, Sweden, and Iceland are often talked about and studied as some of the happiest populations in the world. One big variable in their lifestyle is that, compared to most other western cultures, Scandinavians have a high rate of membership in social groups like charity organizations, fraternities, or clubs, and most report having at least one, if not several, standing social commitments each week, such as a regular dinner party,
book club, or game night.
When we measure up these behavioural patterns against the findings from people like those in the Harvard Grant Study, it’s easy to see why they’re so happy: they’re creating long-term commitments to participation in activities that will put them continuously in the path of creating and nurturing warm relationships.
There is great power in social commitments.
By having the social obligations that come with attending organized gatherings, more time is spoken for in structured ways that leave less opportunities to sit at home endlessly scrolling through social media, or being lonely.
“A commitment device is a choice that an individual makes in the present which restricts his own set of choices in the future, often as a means of controlling future impulsive behavior and limiting choices to those that reflect long-term goals,” say journalist Stephen J. Dubner and economist Steven Levitt. Commitment devices are a way to lock yourself into following a plan of action that you might not want to do but you know is good for you.
Do you know it’s better for you to be social than isolated? Make it easier for yourself to follow through by setting up a standing commitment. Get it on the calendar. Make it a recurring event that shows up on autopilot. Show up. Rinse, repeat. You’re building habits of happiness.
What on earth do you live for, if not happiness?
Your commitments, according to Philip Brickman, an expert in the psychology of happiness. In his opinion, commitments are the true road to salvation, the solution to an otherwise absurd existence. In his work, he recognizes that commitments don’t always give pleasure; they may even “oppose and conflict with freedom or happiness,” as he writes in his book Commitment, Conflict, and Caring,” but in many ways, that is the point: “The more we sacrifice for something, the more value we assign to it.”
So why do we gorge on so much “freedom” from commitment that we choke on it- showing up for nothing, doing nothing wholeheartedly, canceling plans but not to do something else?
Why does it seem like our culture despises commitment, sees it in most cases as an unfortunate state to be in, and one worth getting out of if at all possible, only to be entered into regrettably if there's no other means to an end?
FOMO is a pretty big villain in this story, and understanding that is important because it’s natural and normal for mature adult humans to value commitment, and to respect the ability to commit in others as a strength- not to avoid it at all possible costs.
Here’s why: FOMO hates commitment.
And the forces that thrive on FOMO- empty materialism, dopamine-driven, data-selling social media- know it.
If you’re truly committed to what you’re doing, to your relationships, to your plans, you’re very hard to get to. You’re distraction-proof. Drama-proof. Surrender-proof.
Other people know it, too. If you regularly MAKE and KEEP commitments (you have to do both for it to work), you become known as a man or woman of your word. Trustworthy. Strong. Someone with integrity. Someone worth taking a chance on, or giving opportunities to.
It’s very hard to sell something to someone who’s already doing what they want and has what they want, and if a project or time spent with someone you value is something you’re committed to, cat videos or DMs or notifications aren’t going to get a word in edgewise.
Commitment is empowering, inoculating, and value-adding.
The goal is aliveness.
The purpose is love.
Take up the good burden of being committed.
. . . .
Originally posted on my dedicated blog on Medium.com
