Last summer, during what proved to be a brief interlude of openness during the pandemic, I was visiting some breweries. When I was sitting at the first, a group of cyclists sat down at a table next to me. They left before me, and after some time I got on my way too. I walked over to the next brewery, which was about a kilometre away. Just as I got there, this same group was preparing to leave. We recognized and greeted each other, and I then took up a spot as they rode away. After some meandering, I came to the next brewery on my itinerary, and, naturally, they were there. In contrast to the previous two places, this patio was full. While I waiting in line, one of them came up to me and invited me to join them.

I took them up on it, and we started chatting about the places we’d both visited that day. They told me their impressions about the spots we’d both tried, and how they compared to some of the ones they’d visited on their travels. It turned out that they had travelled together quite a bit, to all sorts of US cities, from the major to the indifferent. I was intrigued by this since it seemed unusual both that a group of friends should have travelled so extensively together and that they should have gone to such a variety of destinations. They explained to me that one of them was a diehard fan of this one football team, the Seattle Seahawks. I noticed at this point that the friend was wearing a Seahawks mask, no doubt one which we had specially ordered. Every year, they told me, a group of them would go see a Seahawks game together, not necessarily in Seattle. And so they would end up in different cities with NFL franchises for the game against the Seahawks. Over the years, they’d had all sorts of different experiences, both of the games and the towns. They told me about the raging atmosphere inside the Seahawks home stadium; they recounted the difficulties involved in finding a hotel near small, snowy Green Bay; they told me about the beer scene in Pittsburgh.

This was on one level all very bizarre. When asked why he was so devoted to the Seahawks, the friend didn’t, as far as I could tell, have any particularly compelling explanation. He had no discardable connection to Seattle; he vaguely mentioned something about his dad liking them and that as a result he had always cheered for them. As far as I knew, the Seahawks had nothing to do with Toronto, or Canada, and they weren’t part of the first tier, historic NFL teams that had international followings. There was, in other words, no reason for him to be a Seahawks fan. In spite of this, he and his friends had all enjoyed such rich experiences as a result this peculiar fandom. They had seen all sorts of places that they would probably never have visited; they had the excitement and agony of following the fortunes of this one organization; their friendship grew through regular, structured travels.

A more or less arbitrary choice to support this one team had unlocked a whole world of experience. The key was that there had been this choice, a choice that went beyond an interest in football generally and underwrote a commitment to a specific team. Without this, he and they would presumably have been just regular, casual followers of the NFL, maybe participating in fantasy football, maybe once travelling to Buffalo to see whoever happened to be playing. Some may have had nothing to do with football at all. Instead, they had a special stake, perspective, and anchor, that made it incomparably richer. The specifics of the choice – the identity of the team – was actually unimportant. This friend might as well have supported the Kansas City Chiefs or the Cincinnati Bengals; that would seemingly have been no more rational but no less effective.

The value of commitment doesn’t necessarily lie in the thing to which you’re committing. There is value in commitment per se insofar as it creates a specific bias. This bias then serves as the foundation and the filter through which everything else is explored and experienced. It creates interest where there was none before because the interest exists only relative to the bias. A world can open up as a result of the initial choice or commitment. The commitment can be arbitrary; it’s merely the gateway.