There are few things I truly value. Of course, my family's up there, along with my friends, the music that I love and my alone time. But there's one value that keeps me going, and that's adventure.

Most of us are lucky enough to have the ability to go to new places and see new things often, but we don't always take full advantage of it. There are moments when I'm sitting alone in the apartment scrolling through memes on Facebook or Twitter, wasting the time that I could be spending walking around in some small town or volunteering or even – gasp – meeting some interesting people.

I remember back in high school when I'd go on drives around my hometown after school just to do some thinking by myself or to see the world from someone else's perspective. It's something I seemed to have lost sight of when I got older. So I decided to make a conscious effort to go back to that mindset. Here's how I did it.

There's this documentary that I love called "Growin' a Beard." It profiles the beard growing contest in Shamrock, Texas, a St. Patrick's Day tradition in which men try to grow the best Donegal beard — which the city described on their website as "a whiskery fringe around the lower chin and jowls." So with only a few hours' warning, my fiance and I set off to witness this glorious competition.

It's a 6-and-a-half hour drive to Shamrock from our hometown, so we left at 3 a.m. after a quick nap and a lot of coffee. That night is a blur of podcasts, obscure rap, lush Texas scenery and exhaustion. We made it with 30 minutes to spare.

The festivities were as you'd expect — a group of around 20 people gathered to watch the judges rank the seven contestants and determine who would take home the clear Texas-shaped trophy. (In case you're curious, the man on the far right won first this year.)

What made this trip great wasn't the beards. It was the fact that we were able to overcome what would have been an average week of concerts and lounging around at home with our families (no offense to music or families, but you get what I mean). I was able to regain the spontaneity that seemed to have left me after high school, the one that allowed me to go on all my great adventures.

It's no secret that spontaneity leaves you when you get older because you have more responsibilities and more "adult" things to take up your time. What you need to remember is that life is happening all around you constantly, which means you can constantly be doing something that will forever alter yours.

You're never too busy to do anything; that's simply impossible. Life gets really boring really quickly when you fall into the work-TV-sleep routine, trust me. And life isn't meant to be boring.

I know that I do not exist so that I can lie around watching YouTube. I exist to see and to experience the world, and so do you.