Essence of new
"Why try something if you know you can do it?"
To preface, I do not curate an environment which incentivizes people to answer a certain way, nor use this question as a filter; in fact, I'll ask somewhen between hours and years into knowing someone, and whomever from friends, acquaintances, even professors & relatives.
Why try something if you know you can do it? If you passed the inquiry off as stupid, you'd be Sherlocked to know the responses I meet have great variance.
Yet inconceivably, every single friend came to the same answer: because you love it. I look to try to capture the reason for this phenomenon here.
Honing into my Jordan Peterson, what does one mean by "love"? You know how people say love is the true religion, or God is love? A religious devout may say "[some pointer representing God] is real," but equally believe that proving [pointer to God]'s existence ineherently destroys the faith. Roughly equating the above explicitly,
- [pointer to God] is real = there exists a thing
- Proving [pointer to God]'s existence destroys the faith = proving this thing means it actually does not exist => an attribute of the thing is it's unprovable
You may have guessed where I'm extending this concept: a longstanding conjecture, a believable unproven hypothesis, is an isomorphic concept. So so far we have love, God, and 3n + 1 (I swear I'm not mental). My second favorite pointer to this existing unprovable thing is a true thought. But the objectively best word and absolute title for this thing is new.
Newness is often at the heart of life philosophies—existentialism, stoicism, absurdism, nihilism—, the fundamental differences being both recognition of the existence of truly new things and the reaction to said belief: embrace, ignore, convert the dissatisfaction into chaos, reject. An oversimplification or even wrong, that is how I parse the listed philosophies. Regarding both life philosophies themselves and my abstraction of those four, an incorrect way is not necessarily a bad way to navigate life.
Continuing, to decide whether one acknowledges new, they must consider it. Everyone considers, for each new endeavor they could partake, whether the wave exists and whether it's great enough to be a fun surf. To me, cool people are simply less ignorant to the ocean out of choice. Disregard this assignment when chance is at play.
Within our waters, we're presented a bunch of opportunities and actions in which we can logically decide to participate or not. However, the easiest of decisions should actually be the ones that live in the unknown, where you have an unwavering and unexplainable urge to do something, or you don't.
Do what you love; chase the new with my friends and me.