This article definitely persuaded me into putting Dedicated on my to-read shelf. The commencement speech that is referenced can be found here. Pete Davis is a great speaker.

I appreciate the nuance in acknowledging how some forms of "commitment" aren't healthy (the examples given here are staying in abusive relationships, racial segregation, and the gay community staying closeted). Also really love the paragraph on the Black Freedom Struggle -- just look how easy it is for the brain to just latch on to one part of a story, glorify the success of it, and forget all that came before.

I hadn’t realized that the acronym YOLO — you only live once — wasn’t always a celebration of doing something fleeting and reckless just for the thrill of it. One of its earliest public uses is attributable to the Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart; in the early 1990s, Hart poured his resources into a California property he called the YOLO Ranch, building a recording studio and creating a hub for the music community. “YOLO, it turns out, was conceived as a message of diving into attachment, not freeing yourself from it,” Davis writes. “Better go deep, because you only live once.”

This reframed my thoughts around YOLO. I really disliked that phrase for the longest time, and felt like it was thrown around carelessly and led people to making rash, thoughtless decisions.

Davis includes a chapter on community-building, acknowledging that “you associate with something because you like parts of it, but nobody likes all the parts of it.” He quotes the Jesuit theologian James Keenan, who memorably defined mercy as a “willingness to enter into the chaos of another.”

"Nobody likes all the parts of it" -- excellent reminder...