Commitment issues

what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?

Hampstead Heath, 06/21/26. Our original plans to swim in the ponds foiled, we waded through the tall grasses and ate cherries. My old iPhone camera makes this look a bit blotchy, like a Seurat painting - our A Sunday Afternoon.

The best choice, my commitment-fearing brain whispers, is to suspend making choices entirely. How lovely it is to enjoy the liminal resort-land of indecision: to float down a lazy river, sun radiant with infinite possibilities and parallel lives — or even to become the cool water itself, formless, expansive, free.

Unfortunately, I care about reality, and it has other plans. I open my eyes, realize I am moving onwards whether I like it or not. I see that there is a fork in the river ahead. Facing it scares me: to choose means I must collapse back into the one path I have, foreclose other options, face finitude.

I’ve vaguely struggled with commitment for all my life. As a kid I ate nearly none of my Halloween candy every year; I couldn’t decide what to have first and ended up just ‘saving everything for later.’

More recently, I’ve been stressed mainly by career decisions: I’m caught in a vicious optimization trap, writing endless docs to figure out which of my job options will be the most impactful and joyful — a cursed endeavor. Also, slightly, by love: I am finite, so who should I love, and how?

I thought I’d worked through a bunch of my commitment issues, to be honest, but my recent anxieties have been sparked by three things in combination:

1. Knowing my choices matter a lot. I believe in self-determination: what I think and do will create the person I become, what the world will become. But because I have complete freedom to steer the mast, I am also afraid of making the wrong turn. I have recently even found myself fearing my own thoughts: because hyperstition is so powerful, then is it not scary what thoughts I think, to become the person I will become?

2. Feeling that the stakes are high. I have high standards and expectations for the life that I want to live, and the world that I want to bring to life. I would like to maximize, as much as possible, my impact in this world and the good I do; I would like to experience the beautiful things, so many of them; I would like to make the most of this one wild and precious life. And to make all of this go well.

3. Fearing uncertainty. I’ve been dabbling in field strategy for various Big Problems. This has led me to stare into the abyss and realize how little we know. To take a metaphor from my friend Atharva - we are digging in the sand while the dark ocean laps at our feet. Who knows which efforts, if any, will matter?

In light of everything that I deeply desperately want for life, how can I not be terrified?

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What to do?

As Bilal mentioned to me yesterday - there is only so much that you can get from sitting and thinking. One needs to actually bump up against the real world. Only then can you begin to access the surprising amount of detail in everything.¹

The detail is of course practically useful, to become more calibrated — which means that committing to initial decisions is extremely useful rather than being paralyzed and making none at all!

But detail is also beautiful, and it is easy to make my mind turn to beauty. So I remind myself of what I’ve gained from firmness and commitment this month:

• Moving to London to do this job - P and A know how I was scared to leave the Bay, scared I would lose the drive and intensity of Berkeley. I am indeed different here - but happy and fulfilled.

• Kissing D, first by the Thames: falling - into something. from my pocketbook - green ferns, glacial eyes, vanilla cake on a sunday afternoon, canopy of gold

• Last Friday/Saturday, new friends at the Night Cafe: “tell me your origin story,” chocolate cake, drawing at Regent’s Park, chocolate cones and capybaras at the London Zoo.

• Talking with S at the top of the New College quack mound, late at night. against fighting yourself internally; structure v freedom; expansiveness. Our conversation on the bridge, watching the punters, fear, changing our relationship.

• Trusting myself that I will indeed try to do the hard things in safety.

The beauty helps with the fear.

In all — I want to be real. I want to get up close, to carve out myself and the world I wish to see. I can only do this if I commit. So I will unclench, swim through the river, explore the land and the sea after it, dig amidst the waves — there is so much detail to be noticed, if only I have conviction.

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Subtitle is from Mary Oliver’s poem. If you have recommendations for art and writing you think I might like, particularly on this topic, please send them to me.

Other things that pop in mind:

• Good Strategy Bad Strategy: “‘Without action, the world would still be an idea.’ In many situations, the main impediment to action is the forlorn hope that certain painful choices or actions can be avoided—that the whole long list of hoped-for “priorities” can all be achieved. It is the hard craft of strategy to decide which priority shall take precedence. Only then can action be taken. And, interestingly, there is no greater tool for sharpening strategic ideas than the necessity to act.”

• The Heidegger lecture Samuel and I crashed at Oxford last week, and the little bit of Sartre I read back in the day. In some confusing way I don’t think philosophy has actually helped me very much in figuring out how to work through this problem, other than letting me know that others have agonized over the same things. Poetry and nature and writing have felt more helpful.

• Ted Chiang’s “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom”

  • “For a hypothetical time traveler who wanted to prevent Hitler’s rise to power, the minimal intervention wasn’t smothering the baby Adolf in his crib; all that was needed was to travel back to a month before his conception and disturb an oxygen molecule. Not only would this replace Adolf with a sibling, it would replace everyone his age or younger. By 1920 that would have composed half of the world’s population.”

• A particular text from a friend, Sudarsh, on utilitarianism & love. I think about it a lot

1. On detail: this is a reason I love nature so much. I see the world. Case in point, as I’m writing this in a park: I can close my eyes and try to model the tree trunk I’m perching my computer on, or the structure of a nearby fern’s leaves, but it does not compare at all to the actual detail. I find that my mental models are particularly lossy - I don’t think I am capable of mentally visualizing.