The exercise, in two passes
The trick is doing it in two separate passes, and not letting the second one contaminate the first.
First pass: list the places where government force currently operates in your life. Not what you approve of — just where the enforcement mechanism is ultimately a fine, a seizure, or a confinement. Income and payroll tax. Property tax. Licensing for whatever you do for a living. Zoning and building rules. Vehicle registration and inspection. School attendance. Drug prohibition. Immigration status. Gun rules. Employment and business regulation. Whatever else applies to you.
Second pass, and only after the first is finished: go back through the list and mark the ones you actually endorse. Not the ones you are used to. The ones where, if it were up to you, you would keep the compulsion.
The output is a gap: things you endorse, and things imposed on you that you do not.
What the gap tells you
People are usually surprised by the size of the first list. Coercion that has been in place your whole life stops registering as coercion; it registers as the way things are.
The gap between the lists is the more interesting number. It is the amount of force in your life that you would not choose and did not choose, and that continues regardless.
A small gap is a coherent position — you endorse most of what applies to you. A large one is worth sitting with: most of the compulsion you live under is not something you would vote for if it were on the ballot on its own.
Neither result is a verdict. This exercise does not tell you what to think. It tells you what you already think, which is harder to find out than it sounds.
The question to hold each item up against
Go through the list once more, including the entries you endorse, and ask one question of each: could this be achieved without force? Through persuasion, voluntary funding, or people cooperating because they want the outcome?
For some, the honest answer will be "I do not see how." That is a perfectly good answer, and worth more than a forced one.
But notice the difference between "this cannot be done voluntarily" and "I have not seen how it could be." Those are very different claims, and the first one gets made a great deal more often than it gets checked.
People said the first about mail, roads, schooling, disaster relief, credit, and standards-setting. Each of those now has a functioning voluntary version running somewhere, alongside or instead of the compulsory one. Whether each could do more is an open question, and a question worth asking.
What to do with it
Nothing on this list has to be opposed. The exercise is not a petition.
The useful next step is narrow: pick one item — ideally one you marked as imposed rather than endorsed — and spend a week finding out whether anyone has solved it without compulsion. Not arguing about it. Not persuading anyone. Just looking.
A political footprint changes one item at a time. Not through a conversion, and not through an argument won online, but by asking whether force was necessary in one more place than you had asked before.