Everyone should explore more
(I realize that some of the ideas here are unactionable for many people that are in financial duress - like having the time / energy / money to explore new subjects after work and existing responsibilities - there is not a one-size-fits-all solution to that - not that this post is aiming to find them - and I accept that this post may not be valuable to those people.)
Choosing your career, the hobbies that you focus on, and how you spend your time is a ridiculously consequential decision.
Lots of writers have expressed how insane it is to choose the one thing you are going to do as a career for the rest of your life when you are 17 or 18. Without even sufficient knowledge of what that job entails (that is why internships are so useful), how can anybody say ‘I want to be a doctor’ or ‘I want to be a computer scientist’ with confidence? Yet for some of these jobs, there is a significant amount of buy-in required and (for instance, for some doctors / lawyers) the debt accrued during the acquisition of the degree traps them in a job that they may find they dislike. It would behoove high school students to try and protect against this outcome by surveying the actual job you would be doing before committing to it.
The same should be applied to hobbies / passions. Tons of people try fitness and sports because physical activity is good for you, so even if you find you won’t devote the time and energy to pursue fitness at the cost of all else, exercising sometimes still vastly improves life outcomes for many reasons [1]. So fitness is something that a lot of people get exposure to, and that is a great thing.
But music programs are not very ubiquitous (but also are correlated with multimodal positive outcomes [2]), and neither are programs that have you explore various crafts and trades.
School is the dominant structure in which we are able to influence what kids learn and how they spend their time. I would also advocate for community centers that offer these things to our next generation. It is true that many charter schools and otherwise well-funded schools have these amenities - which is great! But access to these things for more people would be beneficial to all. (Not a hot take, I know)
We should still be exploring, even as adults - hobbies make us healthier [3][4], can help us grow in ways we haven’t before, and without exploring, you may never find the activity that you excel at or enjoy the most. Our lives are long, getting longer, and it is never too late to find something you love. This also falls in line with a regret-minimization approach to life [5] and the idea that skill-acquisition is faster at the beginning stages of any hobby.
Of course, if anybody finds something they truly love and want to devote a ton of their time to, the exploration time can decrease in favor of focusing on that. But I personally think that the time to exploit already known talents / interests comes around the mid-late 20’s at least (unless the goal is to compete in a field in which young people have a very significant advantage - and hopefully people who are so gifted get sufficiently supported to convert their potential to realized achievement) , and I’ve personally found I can’t practice my hobbies efficiently without taking breaks (which can be filled with exploration or other hobbies or work or social life etc).
The average life expectancy is over 70 years, and keeping that in mind will make, for instance, choosing to make a career change later in life more appealing if you find another field more aligned with your interests and still financially feasible. I think this strategy of exploring more will lead to more people finding things they are more passionate about, increase everyone’s general skill level and health, leave people more encouraged and curious, train the skill of learning itself, increase formative experiences, and increase quality of life. I’ve also found continuing to learn and explore new things makes life more wondrous and exciting.