commitment is an act of agency

optionality sometimes feels like Midas gold

My city is always in flux, always in the process of becoming. Cranes pierce the skyline, turning chunks of metal and stone into intricately designed buildings. People very close to my age colonise tables in coffee shops, working furiously on their vision boards, starting their metamorphosis through sheer force of will. Seeds of thought erupt in conversations, prompting me to buy a pocket-sized notebook to plant them in so they germinate with time. I collect them curiously, these instances of faith in an unmapped future. I feel the force of their attention on their ambitions like a ray of light through a magnifying glass. I see them as living proof of commitment, of what’s possible when we pick one path.

My own dynamic with commitment is curiously split. To relationships, I commit easily, almost instinctively, digging channels so deep they’re visible from space. I find endless fascination in the daily rhythms of loving someone. But with projects—like the novels and publications and businesses in my drafts—I’m all movement, no roots. The same person who wants to spend years exploring the depths of a single relationship will abandon a personal project at the first sign of resistance. These two versions of myself feel like strangers sometimes: one who knows how to stay, and one who's always looking for the escape hatch.

As a culture, we have such a weird relationship with commitment. We talk about it like it’s a heavy thing, draped in the language of loss: doors closing, options disappearing, futures foreclosed. I used to think of it this way too, wanting to collect possibilities like talismans against the future. Wondering what it would be like to ping from thing to thing like stones across water, maximising how many times I can skip before I sink. To me, especially fresh out of college, keeping my options open felt like the right game to play, but I wonder now if it wouldn’t have trapped me in its own kind of finitude. 

Observing the nature of commitment has taught me quite a bit about the nature of optionality. We think we’re maximising freedom. What we’re really doing is trapping ourselves in a kind of shallow-end infinity: always beginning, never evolving. Choice is great; endless choice is distraction. A fake richness, like Midas gold. What feels like living fully actually limits us to a very narrow band of human experience. 

I’m thinking now about the writers I love, and how they return to the same themes over and over, each time discovering something new. Hokusai painted endless visions of Mount Fuji; Sally Rooney stuck love under a microscope. Scientists spend decades studying a single species of moth, finding entire universes in its tiny frame. I think about the relationships around me that I secretly envy, the kind that deepen not despite routine but because of it. There's much to be said about choosing to stay with something long enough for it to surprise you.

This is what nobody tells you: commitment is an act of agency. We often get through life comforted by the thought that we have the ability to make choices, theoretically. But there's a peculiar magic that happens when you actually exercise that choice: the world shifts on its axis. You make active choices about how to use your time, energy, and attention. When you think of it like this, keeping your options permanently open feels a lot like surrendering your agency to circumstance. That kind of uncommitted energy is potential: it just sits there, pristine and perfect, full of promise but changing nothing. Committed energy is kinetic: it engages with reality and creates real change. When you choose to commit to something, you pour ourselves into it completely. You guide its evolution.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that our ability to bind our future selves to a future is what makes us agentic, rather than just moment-to-moment responders. Maybe the total inability to commit is a deeper kind of temporal fragmentation—the self splintering into a thousand disconnected moments instead of flowing through time as a continuous “I”. It’s fascinating to turn this idea over, to realise that true agency requires the ability to project our will forward in time. The core ability to commit to something and hold on to it is perhaps inseparable from true agency itself. Refusing to leave ourselves stuck in a perpetual present tense.

If we were to flip that on its head, the fear of commitment is really a failure of agency, of taking full responsibility for our choices and their consequences. A kind of learned helplessness dressed up as freedom. I think that’s why commitment feels so heavy to some people. You’re accepting full authorship of something, and you can't blame circumstances or timing or compatibility for much longer. You're essentially saying 'This is my choice, and I accept responsibility for making it work’.

The older I grow, the more convinced I become that commitment generates a kind of experiential wealth that can't be brute-forced into existence. There's this fascinating fractal effect that occurs, where constraint transmutes into focus, revealing layers of complexity a dabbler would miss entirely. It's not a limitation, because even that word feels subtractive, stressing what you can't do. No, commitment is generative—it's about what you discover when you choose to stay. You’ll know who you are by what you choose to go all in on. 

Hi again, from this side of the new year. I hope you all had a restful break, and I wish you a 2025 full of wonder. I’ve had so many thoughts about commitment spiralling in my mind that I don’t think this is the last you’ll hear of the topic. The grand thing about questions is that they generate more questions, and I want to write about those soon. Particularly on commitment in relationships, which feels like a different ball game. I would love to hear from you: what do you think commitment signals?