Pete Davis: Committing in an age of endless browsing (ep326)
What signs are there that the dominant culture has trended towards one of “choice paralysis”, with many stuck in “infinite browsing mode”? And how might encouraging people to commit—to causes, place, people, projects—support the societal transformation many deeply yearn for?
In this episode, we welcome Pete Davis, a writer and civic advocate from Falls Church, Virginia. Pete works on civic projects aimed at deepening American democracy and solidarity, and he is the co-founder of Getaway and the Democracy Policy Network, a state policy organization focused on raising up ideas that deepen democracy.
Pete became well-known for his Harvard Law School graduation speech, “A Counterculture of Commitment,” which has been viewed more than 30 million times and became the basis for his book, Dedicated: The case for commitment in an age of infinite browsing.
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Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Indigenous Cloud
“The fallacy of the self-help book is that you are alone, with complete agency, to transform yourself to whatever you want to be. But agency is affected and bounded by structure—of the world, of education, of the economy, of culture—which affects our choices.”
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Transcript:
Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Pete Davis: I've had the blessing of running into a bunch of, what I call, long-haul heroes in my life, who are the heroes of my book Dedicated, because they're the people who commit to things and work at them for a long time. My dad was an Indigenous rights activist, and he worked on that for half a century. In college, I ran into people who were working on everything from consumer protection to community re-engagement to deepening democracy. Those all led me to become very interested in this idea of committing to things and working at them for a long time.
The jumping-off point for this message is that we're living in dark times. There's a feeling that community is in decline, there are major political problems, climate issues, a sense that our hopes have turned out to not be as hopeful as we thought—like the Internet. And there's a sense that we're losing faith in institutions as they're being corrupted.
So this book is guidance on what we do in dark times, how we respond. The guidance that we're getting from school is to keep your options open, to take care of your future self by making sure you don't close any doors, maximizing optionality. And then another message we're getting is get private and take care of yourself. But this is not enough.
Keeping your options open doesn't address those problems out in the world, nor does it lead to the peace and impact and joy that we're seeking out personally.
So I wanted to bring an alternative message of what to do, which is to dig into something, get committed, dedicate yourself over the long haul, which I argue is the thing that addresses all those things that are making our times dark, and bring us peace, impact, and joy that we're seeking personally.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you for sharing that. Besides, a lot of educators and leaders telling young people to keep their options open, what are some other signs you've seen of what you call "infinite browsing mode"? And how do we know that we're heading in the direction of a lack of commitment?
Pete Davis: Let's start practically on an individual level. Browsing itself is not the enemy. The enemy is infinite browsing. We first have to come to terms with the good parts of browsing, to understand where it starts curdling into the bad parts. Browing allows us to be flexible. And browsing very significantly helps us find our authentic self. By shedding inherited, involuntary commitments and exploring and going on adventures, we're able to discover who our true self is. We're able to find out what resonates with us, what inspires us. And, browsing is very fun—it leads to novel experiences. But here's the problem.
If you browse forever, if you start infinite browsing, each of those pleasures of browsing starts getting haunted by pains.
Flexibility curdles into choice paralysis—the sense that I have so many options that I can't choose any option, because I'm haunted by all the options I didn't choose. This is what the psychologist Barry Schwartz calls the paradox of choice. We want some choice, but if you're given infinite choice, you get stuck.
Then with this sense of finding our authentic self... if you search forever for the perfect things that fit, you eventually become spiritually isolated, because all relationships involve subsuming ourselves at least a bit in something larger than ourselves that doesn't fit us perfectly. And finally, all that fun of novelty, as anyone who's browsing through their 100th TikTok video knows, eventually starts becoming shallow boredom.
If you do a hot new thing after hot new thing after hot new thing, you fry the wires of novelty in your brain and eventually start pining for something deeper or more special, than just the latest hot new thing. So when these pleasures start curdling into pains and the pains become bigger than the pleasures, start thinking about committing to something.
Kamea Chayne: So one of the concerns may be that this culture of restlessness can cause stress and tension for people, and ultimately a lack of direction and purpose. But how do we know that it's not the other way around—that our increasing stress and anxiety from our worsening economic disparity and injustices are leading to restlessness and a fear of committing. Because I can see how if people feel insecure without the ability to meet their basic needs, they can have a hard time fully dedicating themselves to something when they really only have the capacity to dedicate themselves to their own immediate survival. And what that looks like may constantly shift depending on the material conditions and societal barriers that they're dealing with. So what would you say to that?
Pete Davis: Totally. I call it the great fallacy of the self-help book. The fallacy of the self-help book is that you are alone, with complete agency, to transform yourself into whatever you want to be. But agency is affected and bounded by structure—the structure of the world out there, of education, of the economy, of culture—which affects our choices.
The story of infinite browsing mode is totally affected by the structure of our economy. It is really hard to commit to a place if you're housing-insecure. It's hard to commit to a career if you don't have a strong labor union or labor protections and if you're at the whim of an employer-downsizing by a large headquarters of the corporation halfway around the world.
But the one thing I'll balance that with is that I think it's wrong-headed and misguided to think that browsing is a privileged predicament, because I don't just talk about browsing careers or browsing places, which are especially affected by economics; I also talk about browsing people, ideas, institutions, belief systems, artisanal crafts, and most importantly, our intimate relationships of family, friends, and love. And people who are of all walks of life are struggling with that. They're struggling with that because of technology, because we're less embedded in institutions larger than ourselves... The problem of having 100 open doors in terms of your career might be a privileged predicament. But the problems of having hundreds of open doors generally, I think is not.
Kamea Chayne: This sort of answers my next question for you... Because I wanted to clarify the different types of dedication that you speak to. I wonder if people could be very committed in certain parts of their lives, for example, to their partners, their families or deeper values, while keeping their options open for work and the more tangible things like consumer choices... because they haven't necessarily found what in practice can bring them deep fulfillment and alignment with the values that they've committed themselves to.
Pete Davis: So there are many different types of commitment. Some people have asked me, is this about commitment to your favorite beer brand, or to a gym routine, or to rising and grinding every morning, like some self-help books challenge you to do? And my answer is, unequivocally no—it's not about that at all.
What I speak about are commitments to things outside of yourself, that have you can have relationships with, that can give you purpose, community, and depth, that often involve other people.
I talk about six types of things, and the type you embody when you are committed to them.
One is a commitment to causes, which I call the work of citizens: people who want to commit to pushing the world in a direction. Another is commitment to places—that's the work of patriots: people who love a place and the people that inhabit the place. There's commitment to projects—the work of builders turning ideas into reality. There's a commitment to maintenance—projects that already exist, institutions that already exist that you want to inherit, steward, and pass on. That's the work of stewards. There's commitment to craft, which is the work of artisans, which isn't just a private commitment to craft, but entering into craft communities: plumbers, lawyers, guitar players, etc. And finally, there's the commitment, the most important type of commitment, to specific particular people, and that's the work of companions.
I love the word "companion", because it's just a beautiful word. "Panis" means bread, and "com" means with: so it's to bake bread with another, just to be present with another in their life... which is the best we can hope for with another person. We can't fix, nor control, nor change anyone, but we can be present with them.
Kamea Chayne: So you're really talking about a deeper sense of commitment and not, for example, the market choices we're faced with on a day-to-day basis.
I wanted to hear if you've explored the reasons that have led to this cultural shift, and whether there might be different reasons for the different types of lack of commitments that you shared.
Again, if we're talking about things like movie choices, or cereal options, or clothing options in the marketplace, that to me feels like the result of consumer capitalism that has created, at least, the illusion of choice.
But something like a lack of commitment to jobs could be from a lack of job satisfaction and deeper meaning. And there's a study from 2019 that showed more than half of U.S. workers are unhappy in their jobs. I wouldn't be surprised if the trends globally were similar as well. So I'm curious to see if you've gotten to pinpoint the different reasons that have led people to become more non-committal...
Pete Davis: I don't get too much into it in the book because I'm not a historian and I didn't want to have what they call a potted history of how culture has changed, without backing it up. But I do have some hints that I've picked up.
So first off, people, throughout human history, have browsed and grappled with browsing and committing. You can find letters or novels from the 1700s about grappling with careers, who they should marry, and things like that. But there are some things that I think are contributing to our browsing.
One, obviously, is technology. Specifically, a technology based on maximizing the amount of choices and opportunities you have. Transportation technology has let us see all these different ways of being different places you could commit to, cause you could take on, people you could be with, crafts you could master. Communication technology is kind of the inverse of travel, where it lets all those things come to you—and the Internet is the omega point of this, where you can just make real that Cat Stevens lyric, "there's a million ways to be."
But it's not just technology. It's also a loosening of an institutional grip over the individual. Two hundred years ago, there would be a lot of things in culture, with probably the vast majority of them, totally unjust, that would choose the constellation of meaning for your life, for you. They would tell you this is the role you should take on, these are the people you should date, the things you should believe, the crafts you should master, the virtues you should fight for. This is the place you should be.
And so many of the liberatory movements, for good, over the last 200 years have loosened the grip of those institutions. This is a very good thing, but a real-world consequence of that is breaking up constellations of meaning, and so it falls on us, as the individual, to figure out what option we should take, what door we should choose off the hallway.
We've unlocked ourselves from so many locked rooms, ran out into the hallway of a hundred options, and now, there's not a lot of guidance on where to go.
And finally, as I talk about in the book, there are three different areas where a culture of open options reign in our institutional landscape. One is in the economy, where a culture of money has overtaken a culture of particular things. The walls that have prevented money logic from invading different spheres have come down, and now the logic of money and markets has invaded religion, sex, romance, honor, politics, the environment, and war… all these things where there used to be walls up to prevent money logic from reaching them.
In our moral culture, a kind of culture of indifference, "you do you", "I do me", "let's not bother each other", has overtaken a culture of honor, where we have communities that have moral values and honor people who live up to them and chastise people who don't—for good and for ill. But that's something that's hurting commitment.
And finally, in our education system, we've seen an increase in education for advancement, to keep your options open as an individual, and a decline in education for attachment, that connects you to something bigger than yourself, that instills reverence and duty to causes, crafts, places, people and ideas outside yourself. All of this together—and I'm not certain, I'm not a historian—are vague hints at what's contributing to our endemic browsing.
Kamea Chayne: You do acknowledge that part of the increase in choice is a genuine reflection of people having more freedom and not being forced into involuntary commitments. And that struggle is ongoing because too many are still not liberated from oppressive systems.
But the question I have is, isn't the goal of collective liberation to free people to choice, from the carceral logic of identity that might box people in, so that they can feel accepted for their constantly evolving, emerging and ever-transforming selves?
I understand the need for people to commit to causes towards collective liberation, and towards, for example, addressing the climate crisis and social injustice. But in an ideal world, maybe once we've reached that point, what is the reason that compels you to believe that it's not enough just to be free, that there must be a step after it which is free for something?
Pete Davis: The question of what liberation is, is a hotly contested political question, through the centuries. If you say that that's the liberation of infinite choice, that is one version of what freedom is. There are alternative conceptions of what freedom is. My conception that I'm partisan to is freedom as participation and power, not just liberation from external power. And participation and power in a democracy are going to involve all these messy things. Even in a world where there's a lot less oppression, it's still going to involve working together with neighbors to figure out conceptions of the good, working together on shared public projects. People need to get cared for, whether they are old, young, or sick, or just lonely, and that care requires something more than us individually tending to ourselves. And if we need each other, we need to work things out together, so we need to be committed to each other.
I'm a believer, and this is from my favorite philosopher, Roberto Unger, who says there is no social context out there that fully captures who we are as humans. There's no perfect, engineered utopia out there because there's something about the human spirit that keeps thinking up new ways of being. So that consistent churn of democracy means there's never a time where we can fully just live in our own individualized, perfectly stasis systems without needing each other.
We need liberation, but we also need dedication. And implicit in liberation is dedication.
So you can say, "I want to be perfectly free and not be responsible to anyone else". But any time you're telling someone, join us in this project of racial justice, of deepening democracy, of fighting climate change, you're asking someone to voluntarily take on something bigger than themselves. You're asking them to use their freedom to dedicate themselves. And so Michael Sandel, the philosopher, writes about this. If we all just want to be liberated individuals, the world would fall apart.
The preservation of our liberated individualism requires some communal spirit to preserve it. And that requires a capacity and a muscle among the citizenry to be dedicated to something.
Kamea Chayne: So what you just clarified is the difference between what a lot of people conceptualize as individual freedom versus collective liberation. And collective liberation inherently requires dedication, especially to the greater context of our communities and social relationships, because nobody exists in isolation.
And the other thing that I think I'm hearing is that when you talk about commitment, it's not at all a roadblock to personal transformation or growth, and it's not something that is meant to box people in. Can you clarify?
Pete Davis: I'll say the opposite, strongly. Not committing is a complete roadblock to personal liberation and growth. Committing is the path to personal liberation and growth. You talk to people who are committed to things, and they'll tell you that they have a deep sense of purpose, meaning, mastery and depth. They feel they can change the world, that they have an area they really understand and can do things with, that they have a sense of community.
So many people our age, including myself—I'm not above this—are struggling with isolation, listlessness, impotence, and a sense that we're not strong and capable. We want purpose, depth and mastery. This is what commitment gives us.
You become part of something of belonging and by sticking with something. You learn all the nooks and crannies of it, you develop experiential mastery, and the whole world becomes alive with profound magic and meaning. When you know all the nooks and crannies of some field, or the depth of the history, or the future and current debates of some cause, or all the different corner stores and flora and fauna of some place, the whole world becomes more alive. This is what we're missing out on when we aren't rooted to something.
Kamea Chayne: What I found really interesting was the relationship between commitment to some sort of ideology, and commitment to maybe a social group or community that may be practicing the ideology, and how this all ties to extremism.
Pete Davis: Talking about commitment is like talking about an abstract tool. Like, are hammers good? It's like I wrote a book about hammers, and someone says, "thanks for teaching me about hammers. I was able to build a house". And then someone else asks a question like, "Can't you use a hammer to kill someone?" That's what commitment is.
Commitment's very good. But you can also be committed to the Nazis or something, any kind of awful thing. So, yes, it's an abstract thing that can be used for ill. But one of the points I tried to make is that when people commit to bad extremism, it's because they're committed in the abstract to an idea, and they don't let it become fully embodied in reality. So the types of commitments I'm talking about in this book are about being out there in the real world, which not only comes with your own mastery of the knowledge but also with other people. They come with being part of some ecosystem bigger than yourself. Joining a group that meets up in person, caring about and stewarding something for the future, not just using it as an atomized venue of your own identity.
What you see with extremists, with domestic terrorists, for example—they're very into an ideology, but they're not part of a real-world club around it. And usually, when you get into the real world, it has a moderating effect, because suddenly you have the leaders in the group that have an interest in preserving the public group, it wants to eventually join up with the larger establishment to be legitimated... So being fully embodied in the real world allows for feedback. And when you're alone, in front of a screen, you're just taking in the YouTube videos, and suddenly you want to make your mark, you want to reaffirm your identity in this, so you want to do big apocalyptic things, violent things. But this isn't always the case.
Sometimes you get real-world groups that do bad things, too, but interacting in the real world with a real group more often than not has a moderating tendency, as opposed to sitting alone on the Internet, watching YouTube videos and getting angry.
Kamea Chayne: As you said, extremism, usually, in many cases becomes watered down when they are socialized with leaders in these groups that end up moderating these ideologies.
I want to first say that I do not at all equalize violence stemming from liberation struggles to violence from supremacist ideologies. But I always have questions around labels such as "extreme", because they're very much relative and often weaponized against people fighting for liberation.
For example, our current reality is often considered "extreme"—it's upheld by the interests of a few, and that doesn't align with public interest and well-being, yet it's still being reinforced day-to-day by a minority that has centralized power. So in this case, radical movements, wanting to change the current system, into one that centers our collective well-being, are often labeled "extreme", even though they better align with majority interests.
In the context of what we just discussed, I wonder about how this relates to radical social movements becoming co-opted by greater establishments not wanting any drastic changes.
Pete Davis: I can kind of talk to this with an example. The single greatest and most inspiring American movement in American history, and the thing that calls the bluff of all armchair cynics of today, is the abolition movement. It began as a radically fringe idea, it was small groups of people that were cited in shorthand, in the culture of the day, as crazy. One of the famous ones called them crazy monomaniacs. But in the span of pretty much 45 years, from 1820 or so to 1865, they went from an unspeakable, monomaniacal fringe to the greatest and most inspiring success story of liberation in American history.
So part of the goal of my book is to say, when you think in the long haul, a radical impossible dream isn't as radical and impossible. A lot of causes that seem crazy can only take about 40 years. The first wave feminist movement, from a totally fringe convention idea at Seneca Falls to women's suffrage, spanned 70 years. The gay marriage movement was early 80s to 2015? Things that start completely on the fringes of American political thought, reach the center of thought, and win the battle of their times and change the world... all in a span that one generation can see through.
There is no reason to believe that the causes of our time—from racial justice to mitigating climate change, to deepening democracy, to solving economic equality—cannot be achieved within our lifetimes.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much. Before we go into our final questions, what else would you like to share, and what are your calls to action?
Pete Davis: Honor culture is the opposite of the culture of indifference, as in "you do you", "I do me", no one bothers each other. But this doesn't solve the great problems of our time.
Honor culture is to have communities that actually have morals again, that have visions of what the good, and the bad, is. And what you do in an honor culture is you celebrate what your community thinks of as good, and you help nudge people away from what you think of as bad.
What I would recommend to everyone is to create awards for people who deserve to be honored, host celebrations to honor them, which shows the community that we value this, as a community. That's how you build a moral community. And this sounds like right-wing talk, when you hear about moral community, but a moral can be anything—about anti-racism, sustainability, democracy, justice... When you celebrate people, you're telling everyone we're trying to move collectively as a community in this direction, and moral communities get stuff done.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an uplifting social media account or publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Pete Davis: I would just always recommend YES! Magazine. They've been churning away, for decades, on positive solutions journalism, raising up positive alternatives, not just tearing down the bad, but building up the good.
Kamea Chayne: I would definitely echo that. What do you tell yourself to stay motivated and inspired?
Pete Davis: My biggest one, and I love this phrase: "life has many chapters", which is the idea that there are seasons of life. Sometimes you have bad chapters, but that's not your whole life, so don't catastrophize about your life. And also when you have good chapters, don't think that that's going to be forever. There was a great long-haul hero I interviewed, Monte Anderson, who said, when you're up, get humble and when you're down, get grateful. And that's kind of a corollary to life as many chapters.
Kamea Chayne: And what makes you most hopeful for our world at the moment?
Pete Davis: My belief that culture is not monolithic. That in every dominant culture, there are always heterogenous countercultures floating, sometimes underneath the surface. There are institutional alternatives always being burrowed into dominant institutions. There are always people prefiguring some other way of being. The future that we hope for is already alive in the present, in tens of thousands of different institutional experiments and countercultures, thinking up alternative visions of where we can go.
The world is never closed; there is always an alternative and it's likely already alive. It just needs to be grown and spread.
Kamea Chayne: Pete, thank you so much for joining me today on the show. It's been a pleasure to have you. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Pete Davis: I would just say thank you to you all for listening. Express some gratitude to a long-haul hero in your life. If you're on the verge of diving into something, take this as your moment to let me give you a nudge to do it. And if you're already on one of these journeys, I'll just say keep up the good fight.
