Freedom of Navigation

US military ships regularly sail across the Taiwan Strait. They do this to demonstrate that these are still international waters, that doing so is something they are capable of, and that they will not be pressured into giving up this right.

This is called a Freedom of Navigation Operation (FONOP).

While most people do not operate large navies, there are still good analogies to be drawn from there.

Life, in particular, consists of many days. Most of them you do spend optimizing for the best way of doing things: you yield to small pressures, converging onto pathways that meet the least resistance. You do this to exert the least amount of energy: this is in general useful and adaptive.

In the process though, you sometimes forget that you still have the choice. Despite there being a clear path, you can still make the arbitrary decision of going off it and forging a new one.

Now, the question is, why would you do that? You spent so much time optimizing your existing path. You don't even have to think about taking it anymore. Why would you do something that clearly makes a lot less sense for the purposes of getting through this very day today?

In fact, this is not even how your thought process looks like. Your thought process just does not include elements where there would be a decision. You're just walking forwards because that's the one way you're currently taking.

But sometimes it's good to go against the rules that make sense most of the time. Sometimes, you need to recognize if you need to change something. Just following your well optimized route is not always the optimal outcome. But how do you recognize when it's not?

Actually practicing this sounds like a good idea. Picking a route to work that is mildly more interesting than the usual one, although having the chance of being a lot slower. Or... surely being a lot slower. Maybe you'll find something along the way that makes it worth it.

(This is why having slack is nice.)

However, this can still be framed as a sort of exploration. You are doing a more thorough job at optimizing your route. You do this because it's interesting.

You can go even more radical than this though. Instead of doing it to learn something or optimize your regular path further, you can resolve to jump into something just to show that you're capable of just going for something that is otherwise obviously silly, pointless, and counterproductive.

(The fact that it's also often fun suggests that this might have had some evolutionary advantages in the past.)

Remember the feeling of infinite freedom when you arrive to a new city? Start university? Or when you first get to drive your own car?

You are still the same person! You still have the same tools. (Probably even more, actually.) You can do whatever you want, if you recognize the possibility of you doing all this, whenever you decide to do so.

But you need to practice deciding to do so.

It's raining really hard. You contemplate the possibility of just doing something silly and going outside & standing around for a bit in the rain, but it doesn't make sense. It is not a good idea, for any reasonable definition of a good idea.

You are capable of doing it though. There's no authority forbidding you from doing it. You are also likely to be able to deal with the consequences. (You might get wet; that's how rain works.)

Will things change by a lot if you decide to do it? Unlikely. You will update your self-image slightly though, towards being a person who does not just follow paths but makes decisions and acts on them. Even if these decisions are purposefully suboptimal for the point of view of... locally good life choices.

There is also no point of sailing around in international waters, apart from preserving our freedom to do so. But this one thing is important enough.