You Only Live Once... So Commit

attitude of reckless, abandoned yolo. You only live once. It's a phrase that urges you to jump from passion to passion, from opportunity to opportunity, so that you can make the most of the present moment, no matter what. Future be damned. If you're like me, you may have first heard the phrase yolo back in twenty eleven. That's the year the acronym went viral when Drake used the phrase in the chorus of his rap anthem, the motto Yoo yolo, and so we used to tant that it turned into a song.

That's not the rap anthem I was talking about, and that's not Drake, but it is a famous musician. I didn't know that I was the first one to coin yolo as you only live once until I read it somewhere, or someone told me that they read it in some encyclopedia or something. Whatever they go. Really, this is Mickey Hart, drummer for the legendary band The Grateful Dead. And yes, Mickey's right here. He was the one who coined the acronym.

So what's the real origin story of yolo? Well, back in the early nineties, Mickey was rethinking his housing situation. My music is very loud, and I didn't want to disturb anybody, and it didn't want them to disturb me, and I didn't want the Deadheads to find me. Mickey realized he needed a different kind of property, something with plenty of space and lots of privacy. So when Micky's wife happened upon the listing for an old ranch house on fifty years of land in the middle of nowhere,

he knew it was perfect. Mickey immediately called the number on the listing brochure, but when he reached the agent, he got some bad news. The owners were asking such an astronomically high price for the property that the ranch had been taken off the market. It was more money than we were going to spend. We thought we couldn't afford it. At the time, So Mickey's dreamhouse wasn't even for sale anymore. End of story, right, not for a

badass rocker like Mickey. So you know, I just looked at her and they said, we only live once, and this is our place. This is yolo. The couple hopped in their car and drive out to the property unannounced. In the end, they convinced the owner to sell them the ranch, but still paid more money than they could afford. But you know, yolo. Mickey thought the term fits so well that he christened his new home Yolo Ranch, and

thus the new acronym was born. These days, the term yolo is invoked whenever we want to do something impulsive, care free, and reckless. Should I spend half my rent check on this one pair of shoes yolo? Should I quit my job on a whim Yolo? For some people, yolo has become a guiding principle, one that prioritizes the ability to be spontaneous and act in the present moment, no matter the consequences. You only live once, so don't settle for what's in front of you when something else

amazing might be out there somewhere. But as the yolo impulse to live untethered and uncommitted the right way to maximize our presence and our happiness. Or have we all misunderstood what yolo should really stand for. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy. The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back

in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab with me, Doctor Laurie Santos. I was young in the age when like Yolo pop music was really big. This is Pete Davis. It was Miley Cyrus or like cash Us singing like let's live tonight, like We're going to die young or something. Pete's part of a generation that grew up on the idea of yolo, of living for the moment in a culture that prioritizes fleeting experiences over

long term investments. Pete came of age when you could just swipe right on Tinder whenever you felt lonely, or scroll right on Netflix whenever you felt bored, jumping from job to job and from place to place. It was admired for the degree of URIs doctor Pete Davis. And so when Pete addressed his graduating class at Harvard, it may not surprise you to hear that he started his speech with a nod to the Yolo ethos and the value his generation gets from experiencing all the possibilities the

modern world has to offer. I've seen all the good that can come from having so many new options. I've seen big decisions become less painful because you can always quit, you can always move. And mostly I've seen all the fun folks have had, experiencing more novelty than any generation in history ever experienced. But Pete's speech wasn't about the benefits of keeping all these doors of opportunity open in

the hallway of life. It was about the drawbacks. We may have come here to help keep our options open, but I leave believing that the most radical act we can take is to make a commitment to a particular thing, to a place, to a profession, to a person, and to close doors and forego options. Pete was calling on his classmates to reject that version of the Yolo ethos. He wanted his peers to embrace the seemingly much stodgier option of tying yourself down and investing in just one

thing for the long haul. We should rebel and join up with a counterculture of commitment. Let's get to work. Pete's commencement speech received millions of views on Facebook. The argument eventually turned into a book dedicated the case for commitment in an age of infinite browsing. So what does Pete mean by infinite browsing? You know, it's late at night and you start browsing Netflix looking for something to watch,

and you can't pick anything. So you scroll through different titles and you read a few reviews, and you just can't commit to watching any given movie. And you wake up from your haze thirty minutes later and you found out I didn't pick anything. I've been on the menu screen this whole time, and now you're too tired to watch anything now, so you turn off the TV and

go to sleep. Failing to commit to a show on Netflix may seem trivial, but Pete argues that modern life is full of many more important cases of infinite browsing mode. It's the idea of jumping from vocation of vocation. It's swiping through endless dating profiles, and even when you're on your first dates thinking the whole time, well is this person better than all the people I could swipe through?

Or moving to a new place and saying, well, okay, you know, I don't need to get rooted here because I can always leave and there's always a better thing out there. And I particularly focus on calling it infinite browsing, because browsing is sometimes good in your life. The problem I'm fighting is not taking some time in your life to brows it's never clicking out of the menu screen. Pete argues that the culture he grew up in prioritized staying on the menu screen of life as long as possible.

The message is keep your options open. You know, as long as you're maximizing options for your future self, you'll be fine. Keep doing that. Pete worries that this is ultimately bad for society. He's instead taken with examples of people he refers to as long haul heroes, men and women throughout history who put in the sustained effort to fight long term for what they believe. In the fact that your town has that wonderful community center or farmers

market or park that's preserved. Look into the history, you'll find a long haul hero behind it. But Pete fears that are keep your options open. Mentality isn't just limiting the number of long haul heroes in ways that will make society less happy. It's also negatively affecting our individual happiness as well. And the science backs pet up here. There's lots of evidence that not committing ultimately poses a

huge opportunity cost for your happiness. Consider, for example, the happiness boost we get from experiencing a sense of belonging. Study after study shows that feeling connected to a group of friends, or a neighborhood or a workplace improves our overall well being. But building up that sense of authentic

community requires time and investment. Pete fears that if we scream yolo and jump into something new every time the urge presents itself, we may never invest the time needed to feel connected to a job or a partner, or a place or a friend group. But the second reason infinite browsing impedes our happiness is that, ironically enough, it

often makes us feel pretty bored. All the fun of novelty that comes from browsing, all the hot new thing that you jump from thing to thing and are excited about eventually gets haunted by the pain of the boredom of shallowness. Pete uses the example of that feeling you get when you realize you've just watched what feels like

a hundred short Internet videos in a row. The algorithm of TikTok will present you in the world that day, probably the hundredth most interesting video created by humanity, and yet you're just completely bored and fried out by the hundred one, because jumping from hot new thing to hot new thing eventually becomes boring. But there's a third reason why staying in an infinite browsing mode reduces our happiness.

When we fail to make a long term decision about a job, or a partner or a community, we reap the stress that comes from still needing to make that choice down the line. So browsing is good because it gives you flexibility, lets you kind of jump from thing to thing, but that flexibility is eventually haunted by choice paralysis.

If you're a regular Happiness Lab listener, you may have heard the term choice paralysis before Choosing is exhausting, even when it's about trivial stuff, and even when it's hypothetical, it just wears you out. This is very Schortz, a professor at the Hoss Business School at UC Berkeley, who talked about the un happiness unmade choices cause way back

in our first season. Barry's the author of a book called The Paradox of Choice, which argues that our obsession with the attachment free lifestyle comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes us happy. There's a set of beliefs that are so deeply embedded in us that I don't even think we realize we hold them. And that is, if you want to enhance people's well being, you enhance their freedom. If you enhance people's choice, you will enhance

their well being. And that seems so obviously true that it didn't occur to anyone to investigate it. But it did occur to Barry. He and his colleagues investigated the claim that keeping our options open makes us feel better, and they found that the exact opposite was true. Too many choices can cause us to panic and shut down. We experience choice paralysis, even though we predict that we'll enjoy what seems like endless possibilities. Having an abundance of

options usually leaves us depleted and disappointed. Well people have come to realize is that there's no doubt that choice is good. But you can reach a point where what's bad about it starts to outweigh what's good about it, and you leave people in pretty bad shape. But Barry says there's a further reason that keeping options open hurts people's happiness, even after they've finally sucked it up and

made a choice. It's so easy to imagine that one of the options they rejected would have been better than the one they chose. When you face too many possibilities before a decision, you wind up being haunted by decision ghosts, the ghosts of all the choices you didn't make. And so you give people lots of options. You raise their expectations about how good the thing they choose will be. You invite them to make comparison to all of the

options that they've rejected and everything. The more you compare, the more the thing you've chosen suffers. So you end up making a good decision and feeling bad about it.

Pete thinks decision ghosts can be even scarier for his generation, people so accustomed to never ending choice that they can feel bad about options they haven't even seen but it might not even exist, or future tender swipes and Netflix movie options that haven't even crossed our feeds, And even when we're dealing with actual rejected choices, our brains have a way of confabulating imaginary options and ways that make

us feel bad. Like let's say you're a recent graduate trying to decide which city to move to after college, and you're like, should I live in Chicago, Miami, DC, or Austin. Chicago, Miami, DC or Austin. Maybe I'll go take a trip to Miami and see if I like it, then DC, and then maybe I'll ask my friends what about Chicago, And then you choose Chicago. It's not just that you're like haunted by a Miami in DC in Austin.

You're haunted by a fictional city in your head that has Miami's beaches and DC's museums and Austin's food, and you're like, oh, gosh, I wish I lived in that city, you know, Miami, DC, Austin. Choosing to be spontaneous and keeping our options open means we fail to get the benefit of authentic connection. We get super bored, and we suffer from the pain of choice paralysis, and the alternative possibilities we fantasize about can continue haunting us long after

we finally do make a choice. So what's the alternative here? Once you commit, suddenly your paralysis is broken through by being on fire with purpose. Your identity gets rewired, Your whole sense of meaning becomes connected to your commitment. Your sense of spiritual isolation gets replaced by a community of friends and colleagues and comrades, And your sense of boredom and shallowness gets replaced by this magic of the whole world coming alive to you because you know all the

details of some corner of the world. But if rejecting the yolo, untethered life is so beneficial for our well being, why don't we do it more often? If the benefits of commitment are so obvious, why do so many of us get stuck in infinite browsing mode. We'll learn the reasons why when the Happiness Lab returns from the rink.

I'd say at the beginning of the book, and I really believe this, Like this is not one of those self help books that's like I lost fifty pounds and you can too, or something, or I turned my life around. It really comes for me being a super fan of longhole heroes, not from me being one myself. Even though author Pete Davis is evangelical about the counterculture of commitment,

he does occasionally succumb to temptation. I'm watching movies at night with my wife and we literally can't choose since she just starts laughing to herself, like You're the biggest diffrecrit in the world, and it isn't just the trivial stuff. Pete sometimes wonders if he should devote himself to a cause other than promoting the joys of dedication. You know, I sometimes read the news and I hear about the latest important cause somewhere else. Pete preaches mindfulness during these moments.

He argues that the urge to drop everything in switch Tracks usually comes down to one particular emotion, a feeling that often leads us to act irrationally. Fear. We have a fear that we're gonna wake up twenty years from now and wish we had committed to something else. But we don't just experience fear about the thing we picked. We're often even more scared about the things we don't pick. The word decide uses the same Latin root as homicide,

namely to kill. When we make choices, we're terrified that we might be killing off an alternative life path full of different branches. You only live once, so you better not head down the wrong path. It's a terror that's so common it's also become a modern acronym, one that's almost as well known as yolo. It's fomo, the fear of missing out. Fomo keeps us worried that whatever great option we do pick will cause us to miss out

on future opportunities for other great opportunities. This option comes with a lot of responsibilities that are going to bind my future self and prevent them from being everywhere with everyone doing everything. Pete thinks we should fight these fears, but he can also relate to the worry we experience when we make a big decision. It comes from this good place, which is that we want to treat our future selves well. And I think are just misguided about

what treating your future self well should look like. As we say on the Happiness lab our, minds lie to us when it comes to what will make us happy. We assume that treating our future selves well means leaving lots of options open. We assume that the foma we experience when making a decision is an accurate psychological warning, but the science shows that we're wrong on both counts. As soon as you commit to something, two wonderful things happen.

The first wonderful thing, according to Pee, is that commitments tend to take on their own momentum, so externally, the thing that you're committed to opens itself up to you more. Let's take Pete's earlier example deciding which city to live in. Let's say you finally make the choice to move to Chicago. Once you actually go to the Windy City, you'll start visiting new shops and restaurants. You'll try the famous pizza.

You'll meet locals who will inevitably make you appreciate the new home you've chosen, even if you were a bit on the fence about your Chicago decision before the act of committing means you wind up learning fantastic new things about the option you picked, stuff you couldn't have known until you actually move there. And these new things will inevitably make you happier and more excited about your decision. But it's not just that the external thing that you're

committed to opens itself up to you. You change on the inside as well. We often assume that our preferences are stable, that what we like and don't like doesn't change over time, But the science shows that we're prone to rationalization. We unconsciously switch up even our most basic preferences to fit the situations we find ourselves in, so that we end up feeling good about however things wound up. Rationalization is a remarkable skill. It gets a very bad name.

This is Dan Gilbert, Harvard University psychologist, an author of Stumbling on Happiness. Dan's an expert on the mental gymnastics our brains go through to feel better after we've made a decision. It's really the mind doing what it ought to do and what it does best, finding alternative ways to see reality that are just as reasonable, but that help us cope and help us deal with it. We kind of smirk when we talk about rationalization. I wish

there were a different word for it. Dan did, in fact, come up with a few new words to rebrand our rationalization processes. He christened them our psychological immune system. Dan's work has observed countless examples in which our psychological immune system seamlessly allows us to feel good even after we've made a crappy decision or experienced disappointing outcomes. High school students who get rejected from a college they chose immediately

begin thinking about that college's weaknesses. Voters who chose a losing candidate quickly start noticing that the candidate who got elected has some strengths they may not have seen before. And participants who chose to tell a lie quickly start to believe that the act of telling white lies is

totally forgivable. Dan's research shows that even when we make a bad decision, it's unlikely our minds will realize that we made a bad decision, because our psychological immune systems will be there in the background, unconsciously cushioning the blow. I think if you understand the power of the psychological immune system are remarkable ability to rationalize in the face of adversity, it makes you braver. I think there's a

lesson there for all of us. That lesson is that we should probably just suck it up and commit to the person, place where career we're considering, because even if it sucks more than we expected, we won't notice the suckiness as much as our lying minds think. But Dan argues that the existence of a psychological immune system should also make us keen to make commitments generally, and that's because the act of making a decision is what turns

on our psychological immune systems in the first place. It's much easier to rationalize things you're stuck with than things you can change. That's just a hard and fast rule. Nobody ever rationalizes why their rental car is the best car in the world. They just take it back. But when you buy one, you've got to convince yourself you did the right thing. Dan designed an elegant study to test the role that commitments play and turning on the

psychological immune system. He gave a group of students cameras and ask them to take a bunch of meaningful photos around campus. Participants were then allowed to print out their two favorite shots, but after the photos were printed, students were told that they'd only get to keep one of the two prints. They had to make a tough decision. Half of the photographers were told that this tough decision

would be permanent. The British instructor running the class would be taking whichever print they didn't choose back to his office in London, never to be seen again. But the other half of students were told that their choice was reversible. The unchosen print would remain close by on campus so

they could easily change their mind. Dan was interested in which group of students wound up happiest with their decision in the end, the students who were trapped in their first choice or the ones who got to change their minds. The results were pretty striking. Students who were stuck in their decision like the photo they chose significantly more than

the ones who could switch. Most of us work hard to have our options open, but this little bit of wisdom suggests that were better rationalizers when our options are closed. But who among us says I want to go shop at places that won't allow me to return the items, I want to sign up for magazine subscriptions I can't ever cancel. None of us. So we make a mistake when we design our lives with maximal freedom, because that freedom is also the freedom to keep wondering if we

did the right thing. We are really good at adapting to things, but it only happens if we commit to something. Author Pete Davis says the lesson we should take from Dan Gilbert's research is that instead of feeling fomo, we should fear not committing, we should fear not dedicating ourselves

long haul to specific people, places, and crafts. What you miss out on by closing those one hundred doors and settling into a room is nothing compared to what you're going to missus out on if you never settle into a room, becoming an elder in a community, becoming a master of a craft, celebrating your tenth anniversary, seeing a project to get off the ground. And that's why Pete's

becomes so obsessed with his long haul heroes. As we chatted, he brought up even more examples of change makers who picked a lane and stuck to it, watching this documentary biography of Nader in the seventies fighting for these consumer protections, or hearing about Jane Adams starting the settlement house movement. But there was one name I didn't expect to hear in Pete's list of long haul heroes. It's the grateful

dead drummer Mickey Hart started a Yolo ranch. Wait Mickey Hart grateful dead drummer literal inventor of the acronym yolo. I thought he was kind of the antithesis of a long hauler. If you're a drummer, you should always know where the exit is. That's well, I say, you know, things can go wrong and you got to get out of here quick. But Pete had a very different interpretation of why Mickey used that now famous acronym. When he and his wife made that decision to buy their ranch.

You know, they looked at each other and it was like, if we're gonna do it, we better make this commitment work. And they've now had it for decades and it has become their dream. So have we got yolo all wrong? Has Mickey figured out a philosophy of you only live once that really does promote happiness? The kids today they really think of yolo as you know, don't commit, leave all the doors open, never walk through any of them. And it's just not I think it's not what you meant.

It's not what the no no, no, no, no, no, no, not at all. I can't believe that it's not obvious the happiness lab will be right back. I did write a song called Happiness is drumming, and it turned into one of the big Grateful Dead songs called Fireing on the Mountain. As I chatted with Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, I was humbled to realize that he'd been carefully thinking about the path to happiness long before many happiness experts

like me were even born. Life is short, and to find happiness you have to be in the now, in the moment that is happiness, which then you're living. You're not living in the past, you're not living in the future. You're living here now, and being in the moment will eventually lead to something marvelous, magnificent. So that's how I see yolo. Before talking to Mickey, I'd assumed his brand of yolo would be lived fast and party like a rock star. But apparently I and others have gotten Mickey's

original notion of yolo very very wrong. I never used yolo when I was partying at all. I'd never even thought of it, you know, like, Okay, let's have a Yolo night for Mickey. The mantra that you only live once isn't about partying. It's about making sure that you're using the precious life you have wisely and that doesn't mean switching tracks whenever the urch strikes. To Mickey, yolo means dedicating yourself to the things you love for the long haul. Go at it with everything you have. I mean,

once you find it, there's no rest. It's not a frivolous thing. It's a sohole thing. You know, when there's a Yolo moment, you really know it, you don't want to throw it away frivolously. It's more of a spiritual experience. Mickey had exactly that kind of spiritual experience when he and his wife first laid eyes on the property that would later become Yolo Ranch. I know that we had the chills when we came up the driveway and looked around. It just had that big good feeling, like whoa gosh.

Once you feel it, you have to commit to it. Mickey's version of yolo is the opposite of recklessness. He thinks you should yell the acronym whenever you recognize that you're ready to pick the person or career or home that you're going to stick with for the long haul, just as he did with his beloved Ranch. It was a commitment that we knew was the right thing, and Mickey did indeed fully dedicate himself to that new investment more than three decades after he saw that real estate listing.

Yolo Ranch is still Mickey's home, as well as his music studio and artistic retreat. Both of his kids grew up at the ranch. Mickey's daughter Rhea was even born there, born in the bed we still have now. But the multi decade commitment he's shown to Yolo Ranch is only one example of the joy Mickey gets from dedicating himself to long haul pursuits. That's the way it is with me for everything I do or I don't do it. Period.

Take for example, the commitment that Mickey has made to his now five decade plus career as a member of the Grateful Dead. It's hard to make a living of being a drummer. Mickey first committed to becoming a drummer as a kid, but his loud attic practice sessions did not impress the Heart family's downstairs neighbor. And he would come up the stairs and bang on the door, and my mom would open it and she would have a broom and she would say to him, over my dead body,

and she closed the door on it. Dedicating himself to the craft of percussion early on, also met missing out on other teenage hobbies. I spent all my time in the drum room in the music room in high school. That's why he never graduated, because I was in the music room with the drums. There is a downside to it, you know, because it occupies so much of your time and your energy, so you have to be careful of that. Mickey also argues that we need to be careful when

a big yolo moment comes up. We need to make sure that we're ready for the commitment. It's the courage to give yourself to this feeling. You have to give a big part of who you are if you're really going to go yolo. Mickey admitted that he too has been tempted to jump ship from his commitments. A lot of things pop up you might want to do. I brought a flute home once and my mother just she almost fell down. But Mickey has seen the benefits that

come from sticking things out. The biggest upside he's observed is that choosing to dedicate yourself for the long haul can provide a sort of spiritual compass to guide you when things get tough. I've wound up in trouble. You know, I've been to jail a few times, and I did all the wrong things she could do in your life. But drumming somehow sustained me and allowed me to get through all those dark times. Mickey has also observed that

sticking things out comes with a second big benefit. As Pete Davis explained earlier, committing yourself to one particular person or ranch, or craft or career allows the thing you committed to to open itself up to you. If you don't make that step, the doors will never open. You don't know what door is going to open, but there will be doors that opened that aren't fantastic. Mickey likes

to quote the writer Joseph Campbell. Joe and I were good friends, the guy who coined the phrase follow your bliss, doors will open where there were no doors. That's really the Campbellian way of looking at things. But Mickey's the first to admit that it takes faith to trust the power of your commitments and that your psychological immune system will be there to catch you if you fall. It takes courage to go where you've never been before and do what you've never done before. Or do something and

commit to it with everything you have. But that's okay because that's the fun of all of it. That's life. That's life. I mean, if you want yolo, you gotta earn it. So Pete Davis was right. I and Drake and so many others today have Mickey's Yolo acronym all wrong. The initial use of yolo was not yolo, don't make any commitments. It was yolo dive into a commitment. You only live once, and I'd like to experience those things. And Pete is pretty excited to help set the Yolo

record straight. I want to reclaim yolo for the dedicated, not for the browsers. And the science shows that the best way to use this precious life, one that we really only will live once, is to commit to the act of committing. When you commit, it's like planting a seed in the desert. It's the beginning of a reforestation project. And if you ask any Longhole hero how they feel about what they've done, the vast majority say that it makes them feel more at peace in the world, and

it makes them overwhelmed by joy. When we face big decisions in life, we tend to dwell on what we'll miss out on when we make a commitment. We often worry that choosing one thing, whether it's a spouse or a career, or a craft or a place to live, we'll mean closing doors on better opportunities for our future.

But what our lying minds don't realize is that the best gift we can give our future selves is the joy of the long haul, all the benefits of connection and depth and joy that can only come from investment and dedication. So the next time you're stuck on that metaphorical menu screen of life, harness your inner Mickey heart and scream yolo. I'm ready for all the incredible opportunities that lie on the other side of this new door of dedication, ones that I'll never even know about until

I turn the knob and walk through. I hope that opening these doors of commitment will lead you to all the happiness and joy that Pete saw and his long Call heroes, And I hope at least some of those doors will lead you back here once again for the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley, Emily Ann Vaughan and Courtney Guerino. Joseph Friedman checked Our x Our. Original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with

additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Milabelle Heather Fame, John Schnarz, Carli Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Royston Preserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me Doctor Laurie Santos. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts,