The Lure of a Fully Randomized Life - The Atlantic

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Max Hawkins had started to feel trapped by his optimized life. Every weekday, he woke up at exactly 7 a.m. and grabbed a single-­origin pour-­over from the best café in his San Francisco neighborhood, at least according to Yelp. He got on his bike and rode 15 minutes and 37 seconds along the best possible route to Google, where he was a software engineer. He spent eight hours working, then met friends for a beer at a craft brewery or a hang in Mission Dolores Park. But despite his great job and charmed life, something felt off.

One afternoon at work, while reading an academic paper, he located the source of his ennui. The study, which tracked the movements of 100,000 anonymized mobile-phone users over six months, had found that human mobility is surprisingly predictable: Our days default to simple, repeatable patterns.

The engineer part of Max’s brain thought the research was pretty cool, but he also found it unsettling. “There was something very programmed about the way I was living,” he told me. If his movements were that predictable, where did that leave his free will?

That night, as he lay in bed, he started thinking about how the structure of people’s lives determines the outcomes of their lives. His life’s structure had become disconcertingly rigid. He didn’t like the sense that, day to day, he was reading a story he’d already read.

The following Friday, Max and a friend were planning to hang out at a bar that had recently opened, one with all the qualities Max usually looked for: good beer, soft lighting, nostalgic indie hits on the playlist. But he couldn’t get the human-mobility study off his mind. The new hip bar is exactly where a computer would expect me to go, he thought. So he decided to design an algorithm to help him break from his routine.

Read: The tension that defines modern life<br>Max had long been fascinated by how to infuse randomness into his work. (In college, he had learned to make computer-generated art, and often tried to inject a sense of serendipity into otherwise rigid coding projects.) So while others might have sought out variety by, say, trying a new restaurant, Max created an app.

The program allowed Max to call an Uber to take him to a surprise location in the city, known only to the driver. In what was perhaps a sign from the universe, his first attempt took him and his friend to the ER at the San Francisco General Hospital. (They ended up going to a bar around the corner and had a great time.)

Though Max had been living in San Francisco for years, his continued trials with the random ride generator brought him to places in the city he hadn’t known existed: a leather bar in the Castro, San Francisco State University’s planetarium, a bowling alley on a side of town he had never visited. His experiments were like uncertainty exposure therapy—and they became a bit of an obsession. He decided to apply the same process to other decisions in his life, building half a dozen apps to randomize the restaurants where he ate, the music he listened to, and even the tattoos he got. (He now has two geometric stick figures permanently etched on his chest.) Soon, Max was outsourcing as many decisions as possible to his army of randomization algorithms. “In choosing randomly,” he said, “I found freedom.”

Yet as I learned about Max’s experiments, I wasn’t so sure. Was ceding his life decisions to a computer algorithm actually a source of freedom—or a different kind of trap?

Humans have long designed mechanisms to outsource their decisions to chance: dropping sticks, flipping coins, rolling dice. And social-science research suggests that even if a person ends up making their own decision, aids such as these can help. In one 2019 study using coin flips, researchers from the University of Basel, in Switzerland, found that participants followed the counsel of the coin or used their reaction to the result as a window into their true preference. The action helped them make up their mind.

If you’re anything like me, the idea of surrendering your life choices to something like a six-­sided plastic cube is terrifying. Though “The dice made me do it” could, at times, be a convenient excuse, my hesitance to relinquish control would outweigh any potential for serendipitous delight. (In this way I am, I suppose, very different from Max.) But although making decisions randomly might seem like the ultimate act of the unknown, Michel Dugas, a psychology professor at the Université du Québec en Outaouais, in Canada, who specializes in uncertainty, told me that he isn’t so sure.

In the 1990s, Dugas created a scale to measure an individual’s capacity to withstand ambiguity and uncertainty; he coined the phrase “intolerance of uncertainty” as an explanation for many of his patients’ anxiety disorders. “When people are highly intolerant of uncertainty, they exhibit one of two behaviors: They either seek information or...