Commitment — How To Live Life To The Full

Commitment, ironically, is the way to be free.

We simply cannot do everything we want to during our lives.

We cannot do everything that is truly valuable and good.

We do not have the time, the resources, the energy.

Committing to something thus requires one to stop pursuing perfection since one cannot know the optimal path. Therefore, commitment requires bravery and courage.

But it’s not always a popular notion.

You only live once

You will never have as much time and energy as you do now.
You only have one life.
There will only be one time that you are this young.
These moments right now.
These will be the good old days.
These will be the days you will feel nostalgic about.

So what are we told?

YOLO
Live life to the extreme.
Be free, travel, do crazy things, be spontaneous!
Don’t attach yourself.
Don’t allow yourself to get bogged down.

And this is, on one hand, a great message: in this day and age, so many of us are trapped in these sedentary lifestyles hoping to one day really live the life we want. We long for novelty, for utter bliss, for an escape from the routine and mundane.

But perhaps a lifestyle of sheer freedom is perhaps not so good.

The problem with being so free
So unattached
Going from place to place to place
From relationship to relationship
From one crazy experience to another
Is that it stops becoming so fulfilling
It gets boring

For it is this very freedom that can also become overwhelming. We can become addicted to infinite options, to the constant possibility of bigger, better, more, more, more. Beyond a certain point, freedom seems to discourage commitment because we are too aware of everything that we are potentially giving up.

But without that commitment to something, our life begins to feel empty and pointless… It’s all just superficial stuff that accumulates and then quickly serves no purpose. It’s only by rejecting alternatives, by giving up certain freedoms through making commitments, that our freedom becomes meaningful.

With sheer freedom there is not enough time, enough space for authentic connection. There isn’t any commitment. There isn’t enough time to ride the waves of emotions and experiences that build a common history. There isn’t the time to go through the necessary and difficulty that teaches the value of the change, that teaches the pros and cons of a particular pursuit.

As Mark Manson says:

“Commitment gives you freedom because you’re no longer distracted by the unimportant and frivolous. Commitment gives you freedom because it hones your attention and focus, directing them toward what is most efficient at making you healthy and happy. Commitment makes decision-making easier and removes any fear of missing out; knowing that what you already have is good enough, why would you ever stress about chasing more, more, more again? Commitment allows you to focus intently on a few highly important goals and achieve a greater degree of success than you otherwise would.”

Commitment

Once you commit to a career or a craft, part of the meaning of that commitment is the fact that you’ve given up on your dreams of being an astronaut or a professional athlete or an artist.

Freedom is only meaningful when it is given up. And we give up freedom by making commitments.

The scary thing about committing is that our minds lie to us saying: “Look at all these other things we could be doing.” It’s scary that commitment means closing down other potentially better opportunities, putting other interests on hold and cutting other things out. It’s scary to put most of our eggs in one basket. It’s scary to think that we are not choosing the optimal path.

It’s scary to think that in choosing to focus on being a pilot we can’t pursue a professional table tennis career. It’s scary to think about taking up a mortgage and realising that we will have to spend less on clothes or steaks. It’s scary to think about all the tradeoffs that come with a particular decision.

But a lot of the time any path is better than none.

It is only in committing that we see our notions of what we think the job, place and relationship will be like change and alter beyond our expectations. It is only in committing that we learn what we can begin to understand how we act and from that infer what we believe. It is only in committing that opportunities we didn’t know existed open up to us.

Aim at something. Something that would be an accomplishment. See what happens. You get more discipline as a result of the work. As you work on it, you figure out why it’s for you or not. You become more informed. You gather information that might then shift your aim. Even if you don’t achieve your aim, the lessons along the way teach you as to what you want.

Conclusion

It’s good to browse on the proverbial Netflix menu screen of life but eventually we have got to choose and commit to a show. If we move from trailer to trailer we are never able to experience the tension that is built up between two characters, to get gripped in the plot, to really learn about who we are. This certainly does not need to be a once and for all final commitment. Humans are walking paradoxes: we need both stability and change. We need to walk a fine line between order and chaos. Committing to things for a period of time sufficient enough to evaluate, to adapt, to learn about one’s self.

Aim at something and commit and you’ll find yourself a different person at the end of it.