Cultivating a strong and enduring sense of self means treating your life like a path. It requires that you do not become too attached to any period of “order” or to any specific route, which usually causes more harm than good and leads to all manner of missed opportunities.

When you adopt an experimental mind-set, you actively commit to an intervention you have designed while also not letting yourself become wedded to it. That way, if it misses the mark, you do not feel compelled to defend it. This mind-set also opens you to other, unanticipated possibilities.

There is a general consensus that optimal functioning of the whole system (whether humans, primates, or machines) requires both stability of goal pursuit in the face of distraction and disruption as well as the capacity for flexibility to adapt and explore the environment.31

This prospect of ‘escaping’, albeit temporarily or intermittently, one aspect of your life in order to enter another can thus have a refreshing effect on an individual, often allowing for greater overall satisfaction and productivity. Seen this way, switching can be used to overcome perhaps the biggest problem with the monomathic, specialised life: