Commitment Is Declining (And Why You Should Resist) – Chris Yeh

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When I look around, I see a world where commitment is declining. I’m not speaking about the declines in the rates of marriage or having children, though these are certainly a matter for concern. I’m talking about the small commitments that most of us don’t even think about as commitments.

Once upon a time, critics worried that television would rot our brains and destroy our attention spans. But even the "boob tube" convinced people to stop and watch a program once a week for 30-60 minutes, even if that program was "Gilligan’s Island". Now, people scroll past a TikTok video in less than three seconds if it doesn’t catch their immediate attention.

Reading books for pleasure is on the decline. Even a typical romance novel, often derided for being low-quality and formulaic (often by sexist male critics) clocks in at 80,000 words, or the equivalent of 2,000 typical tweets.

On the one hand, you could argue that this hardly matters. It’s not like people were choosing to watch "Citizen Kane" instead of "The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island". Trash is trash, right?

But as Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1964, "the medium is the message." There is a difference between spending two hours watching a movie (even it is a pretty bad one) and spending two hours scrolling through TikTok videos.

I don’t want to be an old man yelling at a cloud, so I want to acknowledge that there are a lot of positive elements to a faster pace and consumer choice. Some consumers may even get a sense of agency from choosing what to consume. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that doomscrolling doesn’t just affect attention span, it also reduces how often and how much we practice commitment.

Commitment can be taken too far into blind faith or obsession, but we need commitment to accomplish hard things. And almost all strongly positive outcomes are hard to accomplish. Starting a company takes commitment. Getting married takes commitment. Raising a family takes an enormous amount of commitment.

Commitment requires us to make a choice, and to stay committed to that choice even when doing so becomes difficult or unpleasant. Without sufficient practice, we may lose our ability to choose and to commit.

We still have to make *good* choices, and we have to know when to quit. But when we stop making commitments, those considerations don’t even come into play.

So what can you do in a world that seems determined to put all of us in Wall-E hoverchairs? Make the deliberate choice to exercise your commitment muscles. When you start a movie that’s been highly recommended to you, but it seems slow in the first five minutes, commit to finishing it. When you start your friend’s favorite novel, and you find yourself yawning and falling asleep, pick it up in the morning and give it a chance. And when you’re tempted to doomscroll, while I’m sad to report that I couldn’t find "The Harlem Globetrotter’s on Gilligan’s Island" available free to stream, you could always watch "Rescue From Gilligan’s Island" on Tubi.

Just kidding. Go watch "Project Hail Mary" on Prime Video instead. That movie is awesome.

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