Commitment as freedom
Restrictions can liberate us
The logical perspective
Closing doors feels scary, dangerous, and suffocating, both literally, and figuratively when it comes to making decisions.
Think of the last time you closed a door by making a decision. Could be as big as what you’re going to do with your career this upcoming year, or as inconsequential as choosing a new restaurant for date night or going with your favourite spot.
Sure, initially it feels scary cause you have no idea if that door locks on the inside or outside, whether you're trapped inside this new life because of the decision you just made.
Once a decision has been made, there are two options:
Commit to the decision you made; or
reverse the decision you made by not committing to it.
Option 2 is incredibly taxing. Revisiting your decision holds the possibility of turning what was initially one decision into dozens of repeat decisions. Aka indecisiveness.
The action of walking away from the door you just closed is called commitment. In other words, once a decision has been made, staying the course of the decision and not looking back is what it means to commit.
Committing to a decision will reduce the number of pending decisions in your life by one.
Most see this as one more door shut, which equates to one more possibility removed for eternity, but this perspective can be flipped on its head.
First, almost all decisions are two-way doors, so the possibility can reappear if needed.
Second and more importantly, as time passes from a commitment you made, is it not true that you have one less thing rattling around in your mind?
The fewer decisions we have to make each day, the more mental space we have. It's like a mental inbox-zero: you hit "archive" on each decision you commit to and you can eventually get to zero pending decisions.
The human perspective
Let’s add some realistic emotionality and bias to this conversation.
My guess as to why we keep ourselves from tying up loose ends in our head is the following two reasons:
We keep options open because it feels nice to have things rattling around in our mind. Perhaps there's an addictive property to keeping our brain occupied at all times. No matter what the stuff is, I wonder if it feels better for us to keep our mind full rather than the opposite of having it empty.
The counterfactual of a full mind is not known and therefore is terrifying. For those who haven't experienced the feeling of their mind being a little bit emptier through meditation, or radical decisiveness, it's impossible to know what that feels like. Similar to telling someone with blindness what the colour blue looks like. If the alternative to keeping our mind full of decisions is unclear, we will naturally have resistance to aim for the alternative.
Regardless of the reason, the result of commitment is more mental space.
The fundamental issue with committing to things is that you need to know what to do with that newfound mental space, which is very much a skill. If you don't know what to do with extra time and space, you’re naturally going to resort to the default pathway of action.
Commit to commitment
The way we (don't) commit is a commitment itself. Once you commit to committing, once you commit to following through on the decisions you make, you have one less meta-decision to pay attention to.
It's literally a decision tree. The top node for our decision tree in our mind is whether or not we stay committed to a decision. From there, it delineates into two separate worlds.
What I suspect is the mechanism of action involved in decision fatigue is that we are stuck in a decision-making loop about whether or not we should stay committed to a decision. Imagine hitting repeat on the same song, except the song is about songs.
The main issue with being caught in this recurring decision about decisions is that there is no action taking place; we are stuck in our own minds, flailing around in cerebral soup.
Not committing to the decisions we make is not a prison of our own (non)doing. As time moves on and life keeps going, we are trapped in our heads, only getting more confused with every decision we return to making because of a lack of commitment.
Commitment is freedom from having to revisit decisions.
Commitment is freedom from the decision-making loop.
Commitment is freedom from the restrictive space in our minds.
Commitment is more mental space.
Commitment is more time. Our perception of time expands as we are less forced to live in our heads because there are fewer decisions to be made there, and more time spent in reality, where life unfolds.
Commitment is more action. More time + fewer decisions to be made = more doing.
Commitment is more mental space, which we have to ironically decide what to do with.
More space in our mind is scary.
What do we do with it?
Unfamiliar territory.
"My brain is built to be busy at all times."
Questioning this assumption can reshape your relationship with empty mind space, and create a compelling case for commitment as a way to attain a cleared up mind.