find novelty through commitment
what optionality promises, commitment delivers
Commitment is a portal inwards. Through commitment, we meet ourselves more deeply. The thing we are committing to—whether a place to live, a romantic relationship, a job, a big decision, or anything else that requires us to forego a set of intangible options for a singular tangible one—is nothing more than a canvas for us to create a deeper commitment to ourselves through.
the novelty of commitment
I’ve noticed that most people who struggle with commitment seem to think that it represents the death of novelty, optionality, and expansiveness. That when you commit, you stop trying new things—you cease to explore. But the secret about commitment is: it offers everything that optionality promises, but with more depth and dimension. When we commit to something, we allow ourselves to surrender and feel safe within our commitment. Through commitment, we expand deeper into our feelings, because we are given a container to relax into, to fill entirely, that lets us explore ourselves with more vigour and curiosity.
Commitment simply refines the spectrum of novelty we experience. When we refuse to commit to anything, our life ends up being a giant swirl of chaos, options, and loose ends. So much so that we hardly enjoy these new experiences, because we’re not fully present for them. We’re always preoccupied with the next one, with how we are going to land on our feet when we thrust ourselves from this moment into a new pocket of stimulation. The lack of stability bred through the constant pursuit of optionality ends up being a distraction from the ‘benefits’ we looked to novelty for in the first place. It’s easy to think that through novelty, we get to know ourselves deeper. Which is true—to a point. There are only so many layers within ourselves that we can access by existing in a constantly changing, never stable internal world. Through novelty, we gain breadth. We notice how we react in different situations, what we are like when experiencing new people, places, things. But through commitment, we gain depth. We notice what happens when we need to sit with something, even when it’s making us uncomfortable. We notice how we act when we want to escape ourselves, but remain tethered to our commitment. Or in other words, through commitment, we deepen inwards. This is the entire aim of commitment: to sink into something, to let yourself fully surrender. When we refuse to do this, we end up contracting our ability to be at ease within ourselves. By avoiding commitment, we end up in a state of self-avoidance.
to avoid commitment is to avoid the self
When we stay away from anything that provokes stillness, stability, focus—we make it easy to avoid the deepest parts of ourselves: our shadow, flaws, pockets of roughness. The stuff inside ourselves that we haven’t explored as deeply. Because when we are chasing novelty, we keep ourselves stimulated enough externally to never sit with the internal stimulation we find through commitment. By always jumping from one thing to the next, we keeping everything at arms-length, creating a safe environment to maintain our current level of self-knowledge, without ever having to look more deeply inwards. Commitment does the opposite: it turns our attention inwards instead of outwards—and in the process, it reveals us to ourselves more intimately. We face things we can’t see, hear, and feel through the noise of over-stimulation. When we commit, we settle into stillness. And through that sense of ease, deeper parts of us emerge and demand to be confronted. This can feel unsettling as it’s happening—it might even feel like a signal to opt out of the commitment, a signal that something is going horribly wrong. But this is merely the discomfort that comes with sitting with yourself more seriously. There is resistance in facing the deeper parts of ourselves, but when our commitment makes us feel safe, we can explore these new emotions, feelings, hesitations, and inclinations more freely. What we miss by swimming in the sea of noise created by optionality, we come face to face with through commitment.
selection is surrender
When I’m writing, I constantly feel the tug between diverging towards more ideas vs. converging on one. When I’m in a divergent, “seeking-stimulation” state, ideas pop up all over my consciousness, like a scatterplot or a messy canvas with an untamed sequence of colours and shapes piled on top of each other. My mind is filled with optionality, chaos, intense stimulation. But it is not until I zoom in: until I commit to one idea, one path, one dot on the graph or a single shape on the canvas, that I can actually explore an idea with any real seriousness. Until I commit to one idea and implicitly rule out all of the others—at least for the time being—all of the ideas I’m flirting with remain incomplete, unexplored, unrefined.
This is the trade-off of commitment: you let go of the illusion of having everything by choosing to hone in on having one thing. I say the “illusion of having everything”, because avoiding commitment doesn’t actually give you access to everything, it just gives you the potential to grasp everything while not genuinely grasping anything at all. By never choosing, we indulge ourselves in the idea that we are saving ourselves for the “best thing,” or that we’re better off with simply pursuing optionality forever. But while it’s true that through divergence we gain breadth, it is through convergence that we gain depth—the kind of depth that lets us sink in and learn. It is through convergence that the distillation occurs, that we carry lessons forward, that we genuinely expand into ourselves. We discover, we mine, we extract. The divergence is just the tasting menu: the convergence is the meal. I only truly meet my ideas when I commit to them, when I focus solely on them and nothing else. For example: this essay was stewing in a pile of half-baked drafts until I picked it up and committed to finishing it. Without that commitment, I wouldn’t be writing these words, and you wouldn’t be reading them. That’s the power of commitment: it tugs a wispy possibility out of the air and hardens it into something real. I could diverge and explore forever, half-creating, half-distilling, half-committing. But in doing so, I would never know what I truly thought. Because I wouldn’t have spent enough time, effort, energy and focus on any one thing to find out. This is why we commit. To expand in depth, not breadth. To truly meet ourselves.
the commitment paradox
I get why people hesitate when it comes to commitment. If you haven’t seen the benefits of commitment yourself, you might be thinking: how does commitment stimulate novelty? Isn’t that a paradox?
It isn’t though—because when you commit to something, you feel safe. And when you feel safe, you explore. And when you explore, you discover new things (novelty!). That novelty then leads to self-expansion. You meet yourself in new situations that are cultivated through your commitment. But it’s hard to lean into exploration in the same way when you don’t feel the safety of being tethered to something, someone, some place you’ve committed to. To be in commitment is to focus your creative energy not on the container you’re in, but on what you fill it with. Commitment creates the space for signal to come through, instead of drowning yourself in the noise of excessive optionality. That signal is the inner novelty we discover. The novelty we experience through commitment is personal, intricate, dense. It isn’t rooted in the stimulation of our five senses. It’s rooted in facing feelings and edges we haven’t come up against before.
romantic resistance: to stay single or settle down?
This duality often presents itself in romantic relationships. People say that they want a partnership, someone to explore life with. But they also want to get to know people, see what’s out there. They want divergence and convergence simultaneously. As with any duality, we crave both. That’s natural. But through commitment, you can have both. You can co-create a container where you diverge independently and converge back to each other. You can experience the novelty you crave in a container you share. By committing, you don’t surrender your ability to grow and learn. You only surrender the ability to do so in a container that constantly changes, with a revolving door of faces coming through it. When you commit, your experiences occur in a container you feel safe in, and inside that container, you can explore what speaks to you.
surrendering to what feels right
Commitment is a gateway to the self. A way to reveal what we avoid through the relentless pursuit of novelty. That isn’t to say novelty and exploration aren’t valuable—they are. But eventually, we find something good through them. Something that makes our mind and our intuition hum in unison. Something that feels right. Something that demands commitment. And if we resist surrendering to our urge to commit—if we decide to keep exploring instead of doubling down on what clicked—we miss the opportunity to explore the riches of stillness, the container for all of life’s most valuable treasures.
When we go get seconds at a buffet, we don’t just continue taking little bits of all the things we’ve already tried. We take what we already know we like. We take more of what tasted good. We take what speaks to us, and we fill ourselves up with it. Because the purpose of novelty is to find something we can commit to. After a certain point, we know when we have diverged enough in our experiences, relationships, decisions. We know when we’ve seen what we needed to see. At that point, the decision to commit or continue the never-ending pursuit of novelty presents itself. Once we have stomached enough breadth, we typically know where we want to go deeper, what we want to mine further. And the only thing keeping us from seeing what lies underneath the surface in any one pocket we touched through breadth is our own resistance. Our own layers to work through internally. Because when we deepen with anything in life, we deepen with ourselves. And when we avoid depth, we avoid the self.
commitment is a portal for expansion
Commitment is not the end to exploration and independence—it is a deepening of both, aimed inwards. The pursuit of novelty is not the end, it is the means to the end that is commitment. Life is a journey into finding the things you want to melt into. Once you find something that compels surrender, let yourself sink into it. Break past the resistance of the self. Let yourself learn, explore and expand through a container that makes you feel safe and held. There are wonders to tap into through selecting an option instead of juggling an infinite set of options at once. Eventually, we’ve tapped novelty dry for all that it can offer, and what is left for us to learn can only be found on the other side of its polarity: through surrender, through committing. To meet yourself at new depths, don’t shy away from commitment—embrace it. You won’t believe the new discoveries it contains.
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related pieces: If you liked this essay, you might also like compatibility and connection and on self-trust.
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Isabel, this is a great piece. It really resonated with my experience, not only of dating, but of other life pursuits like writing and martial arts. The amount of depth and richness you experience when you really commit to a path is so much greater than when you flit from one thing to the next.
This is beautifully written. There is certainly a surrender in commitment that results in a freedom to explore. Relationship commitments, however, can be tricky. People who do not first explore their own depths, often don’t know how to do so after committing to a romantic partner. Having failed to established roots, a person doesn’t know how to diverge and risks endlessly dwelling in convergence. This can be especially unhealthy if both partners lack self knowledge before committing to one another.