Order a steak medium in Singapore and you will get it medium-rare. Every time. It does not matter what you said. It does not matter that the waiter nodded. The kitchen has a default, and your preferences are a suggestion.
This is not a complaint about Singaporean restaurants. This is about defaults everywhere.
The Weight of Inertia
Every system has a default state - the thing it does when nobody is actively fighting it. Linux ships with a firewall that allows everything. Most cloud providers default to public buckets. Routers come with admin/admin. The default state of any system is the state most people will live with, because changing it requires effort and effort is a finite resource.
Software engineers figured this out decades ago. They call it the "principle of least surprise" - your defaults should be what most users expect. But there is a darker corollary: your defaults are what most users will get, whether they expect it or not.
The default password ships. The default config deploys. The default steak arrives.
Picking Your Kitchen
Smart operators do not waste energy fighting defaults. They pick systems whose defaults align with what they want.
You do not configure your way to a secure deployment. You start with a distro that ships locked down and open what you need. You do not train a kitchen to cook your steak the way you like it. You find a kitchen that already does.
This is the difference between configuration and selection. Configuration is fighting the current. Selection is swimming with it. One exhausts you. The other just works.
The Trap
The trap is believing you are the exception. That you will be the one who changes all the defaults, maintains the custom config, remembers to check the box every single time. You will not. Nobody does. The defaults win on a long enough timeline because they require zero effort to maintain and your overrides require constant vigilance.
I watch this play out in infrastructure constantly. Someone spins up a cluster with seventeen custom parameters, documents none of them, and six months later a routine update reverts three of them silently. The system returned to its default state. It always does.
The path of least resistance is not lazy. It is physics.
Pick your defaults carefully. Then stop fighting them.
Or just learn to like medium-rare.