"The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it's not without doubt but in spite of doubt"
About this Quote
May refuses the self-help fantasy that commitment is a sterilized state: pure, untroubled, and certain. He’s writing as an existential psychologist, in a century that watched ideologies demand obedience and call it virtue. Against that backdrop, “doubt” isn’t a bug in the system; it’s the human signal that you’re awake to complexity, consequence, and the limits of your knowledge. The line is crafted to rehabilitate doubt from moral weakness into psychological hygiene.
The key move is the phrasing “not without doubt but in spite of doubt.” It’s a quiet rebuke to two cultural poses: the zealot who treats certainty as character, and the drifter who treats uncertainty as an excuse to never choose. May’s “in spite of” insists on agency. Commitment, for him, isn’t a mood or a guarantee; it’s an act you renew under pressure. Doubt provides friction, and friction proves the commitment is real rather than performative.
Subtext: a person who never doubts is often protecting something brittle - an identity, a belief, a relationship - from inspection. That kind of “commitment” can curdle into control, because certainty needs enforcement. By contrast, doubt functions like ventilation: it keeps devotion from becoming possession. In love, work, politics, faith, this frames maturity as the capacity to hold competing truths without collapsing into cynicism.
Contextually, May is speaking to modern anxiety: the demand to choose a path while knowing it may disappoint you. He offers a sturdier definition of health - not the absence of inner conflict, but the ability to commit while carrying it.
The key move is the phrasing “not without doubt but in spite of doubt.” It’s a quiet rebuke to two cultural poses: the zealot who treats certainty as character, and the drifter who treats uncertainty as an excuse to never choose. May’s “in spite of” insists on agency. Commitment, for him, isn’t a mood or a guarantee; it’s an act you renew under pressure. Doubt provides friction, and friction proves the commitment is real rather than performative.
Subtext: a person who never doubts is often protecting something brittle - an identity, a belief, a relationship - from inspection. That kind of “commitment” can curdle into control, because certainty needs enforcement. By contrast, doubt functions like ventilation: it keeps devotion from becoming possession. In love, work, politics, faith, this frames maturity as the capacity to hold competing truths without collapsing into cynicism.
Contextually, May is speaking to modern anxiety: the demand to choose a path while knowing it may disappoint you. He offers a sturdier definition of health - not the absence of inner conflict, but the ability to commit while carrying it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Relationship |
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