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Josh Knox

Just Joshin' #202 (Commit)

Published 17 days ago • 6 min read

Family Photo:
Commit

Calvin started futsal this season. It's our first foray into team sports.

The new activity comes with new calendar commitments: practices every Monday, games on Wednesdays or Fridays depending on the whims of whoever's in charge of those decisions. Calvin's the youngest kid on his 1st/2nd grade team. He's enjoying it, and his indoor soccer skills are improving. It helps that all his teammates are nice. I don't know if that's a statistical anomaly. Maybe kids are just better this generation.

Calvin asked what will happen to the team next year. Responding to my confused look, Calvin went on to explain that next year he'll be in 2nd grade, and the current 2nd graders on his team will be in 3rd grade. But the team plays in a 1st/2nd grade league. Will the team get promoted into a 2nd/3rd grade league next year?

I had to explain to Calvin that YMCA futsal lasts 10-weeks. If he plays next year as a 2nd grader, he'll be on a new team with new 1st and 2nd grade teammates. He was a bit disappointed.

I appreciate that he thought rec league futsal was a multi-year commitment, and one he was willing to make.

--

We made a big commitment this week. Commitments unlock new depths of experience. Experiences that lay just out of reach while wading in optionality. I look forward to exploring this new space.

Dad Joke:
Committed to Breathing

video preview​

Source: @Spaceskits​

Highlights:
Commitment Possibilities

​Hugging the X-Axis by David Perell​

I’ve always struggled with commitment. In a world as grand as ours, shouldn’t we try to experience it all? Change it up. Visit every country. Try a bunch of careers. The menu of life is vast, and it’d be a shame to only order a single entrée.
...
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As my priorities have shifted, I’ve discovered a tradeoff between the shine of novelty and the consistency of commitment. Western culture over-indexes on novelty. It suffers from commitment phobia. I see this in our culture of digital nomadism, job-hopping among yuppies, and listening to books at 3x speed instead of reading them deeply. Anxiety is the driving force behind this game of hopscotch.
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The problem is that a life without commitment is a life spent hugging the X-Axis.

​Dwelling in Possibilities by Mark Edmundson (2008)​

They want to study, travel, make friends, make more friends, read everything (superfast), take in all the movies, listen to every hot band, keep up with everyone they’ve ever known. And there’s something else, too, that distinguishes them: They live to multiply possibilities. They’re enemies of closure. For as much as they want to do and actually manage to do, they always strive to keep their options open, never to shut possibilities down before they have to.
...
​
Ask an American college student what he’s doing on Friday night. Ask him at 5:30 Friday afternoon. “I don’t know” will likely be the first response. But then will come a list of possibilities to make the average Chinese menu look sullenly costive: the concert, the play, the movie, the party, the stay-at-home, chilling (or chillaxing), the monitoring of SportsCenter, the reading (fast, fast) of an assignment or two. University students now are virtual Hamlets of the virtual world, pondering possibility, faces pressed up against the sweet-shop window of their all-purpose desiring machines. To ticket or not to ticket, buy or not to, party or no: Or perhaps to simply stay in and to multiply options in numberless numbers, never to be closed down.
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And once you do get somewhere, wherever it might be, you’ll find that, as Gertrude Stein has it, there’s “no there there.” At a student party, about a fourth of the people have their cellphones locked to their ears. What are they doing? “They’re talking to their friends.” About? “About another party they might conceivably go to.” And naturally the simulation party is better than the one that they’re now at (and not at), though of course there will be people at that party on their cellphones, talking about other simulacrum gatherings, spiraling on into M.C. Escher infinity.

​The Trouble with Optionality by Mihir A. Desai​

I’ve lost count of the number of students who, when describing their career goals, talk about their desire to “maximize optionality.” They’re referring to financial instruments known as options that confer the right to do something rather than an obligation to do something. For this reason, options have a “Heads I win, tails I don’t lose” character—what those in finance lovingly describe as a “nonlinear payoff structure.” When you hold an option and the world moves with you, you enjoy the benefits; when the world moves against you, you are shielded from the bad outcome since you are not obligated to do anything. Optionality is the state of enjoying possibilities without being on the hook to do anything.

​Optionality is for Innumerate Cowards by Byrne Hobart (2018)​

What’s wrong with optionality? There are only two problems I see. Just two minor issues, really:
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1. It’s a bad deal financially.
2. It’s utterly cowardly.
...
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​• Cash is a universal call option: cash is the right to buy any asset for its future market price, even if that market price is lower than today’s. This is a tautology, but it’s a useful reframing: when you hold cash, you’re betting that future asset prices will represent more attractive purchase opportunities than today.
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​• Loneliness: an optionality-maximizing strategy: Close friends and family drastically curtail your freedom, in ways large and small. A few years ago, I applied for a job on a lark, got it, and moved to a different coast for six months. Earlier this year, I moved less than a mile, with two kids and a pregnant wife; it was arguably harder. At a smaller level: literally as I wrote the last sentence, my one-year-old (Happy birthday, Mallory!) blew a giant spit-bubble on the Escape key. Not a specific problem I had to deal with when I was childless, but still a net win. I suspect that delayed family formation among millennials is a general expression of their desire to maximize optionality.
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Many otherwise smart and well-adjusted people have talked themselves into being the Ebenezer Scrooge of optionality, always hoarding the ability to do something later, never actually doing anything when “later” arrives, and giving up a lot in the process.

​Costless Sacrifice by Packy McCormick​

The Old Testament’s 2 Samuel tells the tale of King David as he unifies the tribes of Israel and establishes Jerusalem as the nation’s capital. The world was slower then, there were only like 50 to 75 million people around at the time, and so God could be more actively involved in the day-to-day management of human affairs.
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As, for example, when King David ordered a census of Israel to put a number on its military strength, he angered God, who expected his servant to rely not on soldiers but on Him. God sent a plague down that killed 70,000 men, then instructed David, through the prophet Gad, to build an altar on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite in order to stop it.
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When David arrived, Araunah offered to just give him the land, the oxen, and the wood with which to sacrifice them for free as a gift to the king.
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“But the king replied to Araunah, ‘No, I insist on paying you for it. I will not sacrifice to the Lord my God burnt offerings that cost me nothing.’ So David bought the threshing floor and the oxen and paid fifty shekels of silver for them.”
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Costless sacrifice is not sacrifice. And we, like the Gods, demand sacrifice.

​Wild Problems by Russ Roberts (Derek Sivers Notes)​

The only way to understand whether a certain career path is right for you is to actually try it for an extended period. Those who hover on the edge of a commitment, reluctant to make a decision until all the facts are in, will eventually find that life has passed them by. The only way to understand a way of life is to take the risk of living it.

iamJoshKnox Highlights:
Commit to Science

​Operation Carbon Speed | by Peter Agbo and Josh Knox​

Submitted for the Astera Institute 2026 Essay Competition: Identifying Systemic Bottlenecks to Science​

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Until next week,
​iamJoshKnox​​

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Josh Knox

Hi! I am Josh Knox. Read more of me here: 👇

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