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YOLO : ''' '' YOU ONLY
LIVE ONCE '' '''
WITH ALMIGHTY GOD'S BLESSINGS - in the very nearest of future, any organization, any entity transacting with the students, will have to honor and voluntarily donate a tiny fraction of their profits to ''!WOW!'s Jobless Fund''.
''GO DEEP - BECAUSE YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE'. Go deep and look at the Moroccan students, swimming for their lives to find a future in Spain. It seems no one told them that ''In life, it's not what you're running away from, but what you're running to.''
''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.''
''Dedicated'' The Case For Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing, is Davis's attempt to make this case - to show that commitment, so often associated with conservatism and traditionalism, can be a radical act. There's clearly an appetite for Davis's message on The World Students Society.
JESUIT THEOLOGIAN JAMES KEENAN - who memorably defined mercy as a ''willingness to enter into the chaos of another.''
This superb line is dedicated to the Global Founder Framers of The World Students Society, the great students of the free world. And ever and more, the great students of America.
The book grew out of a graduation speech he gave for his class at Harvard Law School in 2018, which has been viewed online some 31 million times.
Watching it, you see an affable Davis deliver what is essentially the beginning of the book, starting with the highly relatable quandary of being stuck in what he calls Infinite Browsing Mode : scrolling the countless possibilities on Netflix without ever settling on anything.
''I've come to believe that this is the defining characteristic of my generation,'' he writes in ''Dedicated'' ''Keeping our options open.''
What follows is a combination of cultural jeremiad, self-help guide and call to action. Davis marches through a parade of extremely sober references that include the American novelist Don DeLillo and the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, but he's too optimistic to sound like a scold.
Part of his argument is that the grinding, painstaking work that commitment entails is necessary to effect any lasting transformation. He concedes that proposing a ''Counterculture of Commitment'' is a hard sell in the ''Culture of Open Options.'' [I couldn't decide if his shorthand was corny or useful; I came to think it was both.]
Commitment requires trust, a sentiment that takes time and effort to build and is awfully short supply these days.
You have to earn someone's trust before you can start doling out advice,'' Davis writes. He's explaining the kind of outreach involved in political movements, but it also applies to what he's trying to do with this book.
In a bid to earn a reluctant reader's trust, he says that he understands why many people prefer browsing to committing. First, there are the obvious pleasures to be had. Novelty is stimulating. You can try new things without risking too much.
''Liberation, space, openness, relief, wholeness - that's what authenticity feels like,'' Davis writes. There are both personal and social benefits that flow from flexibility. He concedes that emancipatory movements freed people from the stifling grip of convention.
But he also argues that we have focused too much on liberation, and not enough on dedication - on giving oneself over to a bigger cause, deliberately chosen.
Discussing the Black Freedom Struggle, Davis laments the cultural tendency to fixate on the grand gesture instead of the millions of tiny steps that paved the way. ''We remember Martin Luther King Jr. for his cinematic dragon slaying - his iconic speeches and confrontation - but what's lost is all the long -haul that queued those moments,'' Davis writes.
''Dedicated'' is occasionally moving, but it isn't unsettling. There's something of the earnest law student about it; the writing feels assiduous and conscientious, as Davis takes care to persuade us that between the zealots of the past and zealots of the future, there really is a third way.
We can have the good stuff of tradition and commitments without the bad stuff - or at least without some of the bad stuff - or at least without some of the bad stuff; David says that something through requires weathering certain discomforts.
A number of these discomforts may come from other people. Davis includes a chapter on community building, acknowledging that ''you associate with something because you like parts of it, but nobody likes the parts of it.
Davis doesn't talk much about new technology other than social media, but I have often wondered at the ability of technology to insulate us from others, so that interactions happen at our own convenience and according to our own terms. As we talk about the need to be more tolerant in the abstract, we seem comparatively less motivated to be tolerant in the particular.
''Making change often looks less like designing and executing a battle plan and more like cultivating and maintaining a relationship,'' Davis writes.
I was intrigued by this idea, and I was hoping he would return to it in the end. Instead, he closes out the book with the analogy of cultivating a garden, of dedicating ourselves to something that will require ''a lot of work without immediate gratification.''
Given the book's emphasis on not just confronting difficulty but delving into it, the gardening bit feels a little too comfortable and familiar. Rhetorically, though, it makes sense : The metaphor of a plant is easier to accept than the chaos of another.
Davis's point is that we have to start somewhere. He has planted a seed with this book. The Global Founder Framers have struggled and sacrificed for building a better world. Now dedicate yourself to the cause and watch it grow.
The Honor and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Life, Living and the Future, continues. The World Students Society thanks author Jennifer Szalai.
With loving and respectful dedication to the Global Founder Framers of The World Students Society, Mankind, and then Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all prepare and register for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :
''' Deep-Darn '''
Good Night and God Bless
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