There was a time when people just did things in the moment
Not reckless.
Not stupid.
Just… unplanned.
You’d knock on someone’s door without texting first.
You’d drive somewhere without checking traffic three times.
You’d start a project without watching six tutorials.
Now everything feels rehearsed.
We don’t walk into rooms.
We enter situations.
We don’t speak off the cuff.
We compose.
Even conversations feel preloaded.
You can almost hear it — the phrasing, the caution, the calibration. Everyone measuring tone before meaning. Everyone editing mid-sentence.
When did we start narrating ourselves?
There’s a strange stiffness in the air lately. Like people are afraid to misstep. Afraid to be misread. Afraid to sound uninformed or imperfect.
So we slow down.
Not in a disciplined way.
In a guarded way.
Spontaneity isn’t chaos. It’s trust.
Trust in your footing.
Trust in your judgment.
Trust that you don’t need to pre-clear every thought before it leaves your mouth.
Somewhere along the way we traded that trust for optimization.
We optimize posts.
We optimize responses.
We optimize schedules.
We optimize reactions.
Everything tuned.
Everything filtered.
But when everything is filtered, nothing is alive.
You can feel it online. You can feel it in person too.
People waiting for cues.
Scanning for the “correct” angle.
Checking the temperature of the room before they speak.
It’s subtle.
But it’s everywhere.
Spontaneity used to be normal. Now it feels like a risk.
And risk, in small doses, is what keeps you sharp.
When you remove all friction, you don’t become safer.
You become brittle.
Because the first unexpected thing feels overwhelming.
If every move is calculated, you lose the muscle for improvisation.
Older generations weren’t spontaneous because life was easy.
They were spontaneous because life was uncertain.
You couldn’t script everything.
You couldn’t fact-check every sentence.
You couldn’t forecast every outcome.
You acted.
Adjusted.
Moved again.
That rhythm builds resilience.
Now we over-prepare.
We think five steps ahead before taking one.
We rehearse arguments we may never have.
We second-guess reactions before they happen.
And in doing that, we slowly train ourselves out of natural response.
There’s a difference between being thoughtful and being pre-scripted.
Thoughtful has presence.
Pre-scripted has tension.
You can see it in small places.
Someone won’t start a hobby because they haven’t researched it enough.
Someone won’t share an opinion because it might be “misinterpreted.”
Someone won’t try something new because they can’t guarantee it’ll go well.
That’s not caution.
That’s paralysis wearing polite clothing.
Spontaneity doesn’t mean abandoning responsibility.
It means allowing yourself to move without perfect foresight.
To speak without polishing.
To try without optimizing.
To act without a committee in your head.
There’s something powerful about doing one thing today without rehearsing it first.
Calling someone without drafting the conversation.
Fixing something instead of researching it for an hour.
Starting the task before you feel fully ready.
Not as rebellion.
As recovery.
Because the ability to improvise is strength.
The ability to respond in real time is strength.
If everything has to be filtered, measured, and aligned before you move, you lose that strength.
And when something truly unexpected happens — and it will — you don’t want your first instinct to be hesitation.
You want it to be engagement.
Maybe spontaneity hasn’t disappeared.
Maybe it’s just buried under layers of self-editing.
Layers of caution.
Layers of optimization.
Peel back one.
Just one.
Say the thing.
Make the call.
Start the work.
Go for the walk without mapping it.
See what happens.
Not everything needs a script.
Some things need motion.
And sometimes the most stabilizing thing you can do in a world that feels tightly wound…
Is act without rehearsing it first.
micvicfaust@intelligent-people.org
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