“Never go grocery shopping on an empty stomach” captures a recognized truth: there are better and worse moments in life to make decisions for our future selves. The trick is to seize the favorable moments to protect ourselves later during the more difficult ones. Precommitment strategies offer a powerful way to do this.

Given the jarring surprises of the past few years, it might seem risky to make any plans beyond next week. Why expose ourselves to more uncertainty and disappointment? However, thinking of our plans as blueprints and judging them by how close they adhere to the original design likely means they lack a critical ingredient.

“How many of you have dreamed of owning a sailboat?” a conference speaker asked the audience. Dozens of hands went up. “How many of you have dreamed of drydocking and painting that boat?” Hands fell back down. Few of us dream about the time, money, and vigilance required to prevent our possessions from falling apart, so we’re often surprised by what we’ve taken on.

When we commit to accomplishing a goal, we commit to the possibility of at least two kinds of failure - the possibility that we won’t get what we want, and the possibility that, if we do, we may discover that success wasn’t worth the costs. These costs include not just the time, money and effort we expended to reach our destination, but also the things we gave up in order to get there. The poet Robert Frost famously alluded to these things as “the road not taken”; economists call them “opportunity costs.”

Has there ever been a more opportune moment than now to reconsider how we’re working, living and generally leading our lives? The first global pandemic in a century has shaken us out of workplaces, habits and relationships, giving many of us perhaps the best shot we’ll ever have at figuring out what we really want to be when we grow up.

A few weeks ago, Marin kayaker Cyril Derreumaux pushed off from Sausalito before dawn to paddle alone across 2,400 nautical miles of open ocean to Hawaii. He had prepared three years for the journey and expected it would take him seventy days.

With vaccinations rolling out across the country, the factory whistle is sounding. Employers such as Uber, Google, Chase, and Goldman Sachs are beginning to call employees back to the office, saying it’s time to resume pre-pandemic work patterns. Employees aren’t so sure. They gave up a lot to reorganize their lives this past year and, like the inhabitants of Plato’s famous cave, had their eyes opened to new possibilities. What happens next in this developing standoff could transform not just the traditional office, but the broader contours of our lives.