Aeronautical Analogy

For whatever reason I had an insightful moment yesterday evening that has my mind a bit astir. Why is it that we do certain things habitually without factoring in life's variables? Regardlessly we move through the motions on auto pilot and while we may often achieve the same end result, we experience moments of hindsight that indicate we should have steered the plane. I don't aspire to manually fly the plane at all times, frankly the idea sounds ridiculous and exhausting, I do however hope to familiarize myself more with the control panels in hopes of becoming a better pilot.