It's probably a pretty traumatic experience in someone's life when they come to terms with the fact that there are things they HAVE to do. Agency is really precious and I value it more than most things and having to give it up for reasons you might not even understand or agree with is pretty awful. But, learning how to survive and get by in situations you have to be in is a really valuable skill and a large part of what we consider being a socialized person.
But something I've realized in coaching is that I think people, kids specifically, are sometimes so deeply in the mindset of "having to do things" and "coping with being in a situation that I'm not in control of" that they don't seem to understand how to act when they're in an environment that people want to be in.
As someone who works with kids, it's so easy to fall into the trap of seeing a kid show signs of defiance and resistance and then trying to get them to comply. That's definitely a learned role on both sides. I've been trying to take the approach of not forcing anyone to do anything and modeling and focusing on what it looks like when you actively want to do something. My worry is that there's so much that we feel we have to do that we might not realize or ever get the chance to cultivate something we actually want to do.
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