In the past ten years, I’ve lived in seventeen different places. Most of these are from hopping between apartments in college, but it still represents six different cities—five different times I decided I would reinvent myself by changing jobs, changing climates, and changing friends.
Before I moved to Michigan, where I am now, I told my friends to expect to soon hear from the “Michigan version” of myself. She would be better—she’d finally join a community garden and learn what’s going on in local politics. And she would actually text them back. But, of course, on the other side of every move was the same person—now with a bigger (and looser) network of friends and acquaintances across the country.
If corporations and money are the only things keeping our communities together, we are hanging by a tenuous and frightening thread.
I know I’m not alone. Many young people in the United States regularly flit from place to place, putting down no roots and working at several jobs instead of settling into a lifelong career. Sometimes it’s because of financial insecurity, but sometimes not.
In Dedicated, the latter is just one consequence of what author Pete Davis calls “Infinite Browsing Mode.” As he did in the commencement speech that inspired the book, he invokes a common experience—the paralysis of indecision while trying to find something to watch on Netflix that ends in not watching anything at all. Faced with a host of possible options, we end up not committing to anything—and thus losing out on the great joys that commitment can bring.
Davis, a writer on civics and the co-founder of the Democracy Policy Network, a group that aims to deepen democracy across statehouses, is not really encouraging young people to get better at making simple decisions; he has, instead, written a manifesto for deeper civic engagement to create a path toward a more robust democracy.
It starts with what Davis calls a “Counterculture of Commitment”: picking something and sticking to it, while resisting the tyranny of “keeping your option open.” That’s not so easy, of course. You have to watch other people pick differently, and maybe it looks like they picked better than you. You remember all of the other things you could have picked but didn’t. But truly committing for the long haul—and Davis shares many examples, from his childhood piano teacher to slavery abolitionists—is a rejection of superficiality and shallow thinking in favor of lasting relationships. It could, Davis has convinced me, remake our politics.
When Donald Trump was first elected President, I went to a “what happens next?” event at a local bookstore in Washington, D.C. Those days after the election are blurry now, but I remember clearly an older Black activist telling the standing-room-only crowd, “If you’re not in an organization, you’re not organized.”
Davis writes that “real change does not look like Hollywood dragon-slaying, because real change takes a long time.” The dragons that jeopardize long-haul commitments are “everyday boredom and distraction and uncertainty.” In other words, commitment looks like a lot of meetings. So does real democracy.
There’s a straight line between the rupture of civic life and the siloing of our lives into consumer choices, almost always made by the individual or the nuclear family. Consumer choices have become our personalities; they fuel even our political identities.
Is your boss treating you badly? According to market logic, you can always quit and choose a better job, rather than, say, join with your coworkers to demand more.
Dedicated releases on May 4, syncing with high school and college graduations across the country. With an appealing yet innocuous cover, parents and grandparents who think they aren’t political may give this book to graduates to help them choose their next steps, wanting for them the “purpose, community, and depth that can only come from making deep commitments,” as the book’s inside flap reads.
But deep commitments are a political decision—I’d like to think fewer graduates reading Dedicated will join management consulting firms and wealth-advisory companies. And yet, I can’t help but think about all of the things I would have committed to had I known I had the option or if I had the money to do so.
The week I graduated from college, I started working at a big chain bookstore, my two academic degrees earning me the federal minimum wage of $7.25. I walked the aisles of the seasonal display tables, straightening books that promised to give answers to people commencing new chapters of their lives. I could easily see Dedicated on that graduation display table. But, back then, I wouldn’t have thought the book was for me. I ignored those books, took my apron off, went home, and tried to forget about how I could be fired if I didn’t sell enough membership cards.
This is something Davis engages with early on, recognizing that there are people “who don’t have the privilege of keeping their options open,” and that a significant risk of his argument is that of “talking to only one segment of folks”—i.e., young, upwardly mobile white people living in cities (a group I now count myself among).
My father, for example, spent twenty-seven years of his life committed to the same job, his loyalty encouraging him to accept lower and lower wages when the company needed to downsize. For all of that dedication, he was fired at the age of seventy with one week’s severance and no retirement plan.
Being a part of the community, which was possible because he worked for that local company, was a beautiful thing, at least for a while. He was in the Lions Club and often brought home leftovers from dinners he’d host, the pins on his yellow Lions vest like badges he’d earned. It seemed that he knew, and was always helping, everyone.
When I was a kid, I frequently sold the most Girl Scout cookies not because of my business acumen, but because it was hard for people to say no to my dad’s daughter. When he was fired—almost certainly because of his age—the community lost him, and he lost it.
If corporations and money are the only things keeping our communities together, we are hanging by a tenuous and frightening thread. Davis recognizes this, mentioning how McDowell County in West Virginia was transformed by a Walmart that brought jobs and groceries, and then left as soon as profits dipped.
This history goes even further back. Decades ago, with coal as a monopoly and a maker of company towns, McDowell County was a thriving place. That was before the coal companies read the tea leaves and left the community to joblessness and poverty.
Dedicated’s third act, when Davis moves from discussing the inspiring stories of heroes that are in it for the “long haul” to a section called “Solid People in a Liquid World,” is its most overtly political, covering the “Culture of Open Options.” Think about it—isn’t “keeping options open” exactly how a market economy works? When the market, says Davis, “was no longer a specific institution within society—it was society.”
It’s amusing that the back of Dedicated places it in the “self-help” genre, as it’s clear that committing to “the self” is not the antidote to a culture of de-commitment: commitments are “alternatives to self-obsession” writes Davis. The billion-dollar self-help industry is perhaps another symptom of Infinite Browsing Mode, the result of millions of people’s quests to improve themselves on an endless journey of advancement versus a deepened relationship with a chosen community.
Of course, the book is self-help. The long-haul commitments that Davis so admires “don’t just transform society—they transform the committers themselves . . . demonstrating a way out of our identity crisis.” It would be a saccharine argument, if it weren’t made so earnestly that it rings true.