How predictable is your life? I drink my coffee from the same Moomin mug every morning and run a tight roster of weekly meals. My Ocado order never varies. On weekends, we buy the same seeded sourdough loaf; do the same chores; see the same friends. That might sound stultifying, but it comforts me in a chaotic world.
Is it a coping mechanism, an expression of my control-freak tendencies? Probably, which is why I was gripped and horrified in equal measure by an extract from How Not to Know by Simone Stoltzoff in the Atlantic about Max Hawkins, a software engineer who, feeling “trapped by his optimised life”, decided to randomise radically. Hawkins built an algorithm for a “random ride generator” that took him to surprise locations: a hospital, a leather bar, a bowling alley. Then, enthused by those early experiences, he went further and let chance decide where he lived, what he wore and even his tattoos. “In choosing randomly,” he said, “I found freedom.”
Despite, or rather because of, my control-freakery, I felt compelled to give it a go. Being “trapped in a prison of your preferences”, as Hawkins put it, seems almost inevitable in an age where we’re algorithmically nudged in predictable directions. If you’re anxious, risk-averse and fussy (hi), life can become small and unsurprising. Could I find freedom in letting random chance prise me from my comfort zone? Profoundly unqualified to “build an algorithm”, I decided to use dice and lists of options, plus a pound coin, to surrender my day to luck.
It started badly with the dice dealing me a coffee mug I despise and a banana and nuts for breakfast. I was instantly, mutinously, tempted to cheat, but what was this experiment about if not submitting to fate? I ate my boring banana. More dice throws left me wearing jeans (fine) and a silk shirt (impractical), and working from the shed. Perched on the gutted, filthy old sofa, 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 tossed a coin for tea versus coffee all morning, and a run of tails left me violently caffeinated). I rolled for lunch options, hoping I would get to go out, but the dice said it would be eggs at home. Thankfully, my hens agreed. The randomly selected reading matter over lunch was Steven Benner’s Meet the Neighbors, an exploration of the search for life on Mars. I would never have chosen it, but found I was utterly gripped. I won a pudding coin-toss and triumphantly ate cake, not 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), which, inevitably, was what the dice dealt me. I don’t 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 myself 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?) and shopping for curtains. Mercifully, I threw a three: dinner at a new pizza and pasta place, where 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 from Hawkins’s fully randomised life, a pathetic attempt at minor spontaneity, and I can’t imagine lightening up enough to let the fates decide longer-term. There was a certain lightness, though, to a day freed from the prison of my preferences, and a different kind of calm in accepting momentarily that I couldn’t – can’t – control absolutely everything. Sometimes life gives you crispy artichokes and sometimes it gives you “elevated burpees” and that’s OK, actually. But you can prise my Moomin mug from my cold, dead hands.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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