How predictable is your life? For years, I have drunk my coffee from the same Moomin mug each morning and followed a strict weekly meal plan. My Ocado order never changes. At weekends, we buy the same seeded sourdough loaf, do the same chores, and see the same friends. This routine may seem monotonous to some, but it offers me comfort in a chaotic world.
Is it a coping mechanism, a sign of my control-freak tendencies? Probably. That is why I was both fascinated and horrified by an extract from Simone Stoltzoff's book How Not to Know, featured in The Atlantic, about Max Hawkins. Hawkins, a software engineer who felt "trapped by his optimised life", decided to radically randomise his existence. He created a "random ride generator" that took him to surprise locations: a hospital, a leather bar, a bowling alley. Encouraged by these early experiences, he let chance decide where he lived, what he wore, and even his tattoos. "In choosing randomly," he said, "I found freedom."
Despite my control-freakery, I felt compelled to try it myself. Being "trapped in a prison of your preferences", as Hawkins put it, seems almost inevitable in an age where algorithms nudge us in predictable directions. If you are anxious, risk-averse, and fussy (like me), life can become small and unsurprising. Could I find freedom by letting random chance prise me from my comfort zone? Profoundly unqualified to "build an algorithm", I decided to use dice, lists of options, and a pound coin to surrender my day to luck.
It started badly. The dice gave me a coffee mug I despise and a banana with nuts for breakfast. I was instantly tempted to cheat, but what was this experiment about if not submitting to fate? I ate the boring banana. More dice throws left me wearing jeans (fine) and a silk shirt (impractical), and working from the shed. Perched on a gutted, filthy old sofa with my laptop precariously balanced on a tray, I was cold and my back ached, but the birdsong was a bonus.
By lunchtime, I was starving and wired. I had tossed a coin for tea versus coffee all morning, and a run of tails left me violently caffeinated. I rolled for lunch options, hoping to go out, but the dice said eggs at home. Thankfully, my hens agreed. The randomly selected reading matter was Steven Benner's Meet the Neighbors, an exploration of the search for life on Mars. I would never have chosen it, but I found myself utterly gripped. I won a pudding coin-toss and triumphantly ate cake instead of fruit.
Feeling I should move mid-afternoon, I wrote a list of mostly gentle exercise options (walk, stretch, yoga), but included a wildcard local class in high-intensity interval training (HIIT). Inevitably, the dice dealt me HIIT. I do not really understand HIIT, but it sounded ominous and proved worse: an extremely energetic lady called Stacey made us jump up and down to high-BPM noise for the longest 45 minutes of my life. I thought I was dying throughout and managed to disgust everyone by using an abandoned dirty coffee mug to get a desperate drink of water.
My husband and I were apprehensive about our jointly agreed list of evening options, which included trying to persuade people to hang out with us spontaneously on a school night, or shopping for curtains. Mercifully, I threw a three: dinner at a new pizza and pasta place. Crispy, golden, deep-fried artichokes and paper-thin Roman pizza healed my HIIT trauma. We ended the night with a surprisingly successful random Netflix pick: an offbeat, gently funny Zach Galifianakis gardening show.
My experiment was miles away from Hawkins's fully randomised life—a pathetic attempt at minor spontaneity. I cannot imagine lightening up enough to let the fates decide longer-term. However, there was a certain lightness to a day freed from the prison of my preferences, and a different kind of calm in accepting momentarily that I cannot control absolutely everything. Sometimes life gives you crispy artichokes, and sometimes it gives you elevated burpees—and that is okay. But you can prise my Moomin mug from my cold, dead hands.
