Interesting thoughts, Roody, Robert Foster, and wahoonc.
I do think that free choice has a role to play, and often, recognizing how influenced we are by our surroundings and our habits, it plays its role by shaping the environment to make things easier--hopefully to make it easier to do better things and harder to do worse things: With television, for example, I could, I think, have one around and watch it only occasionally, but I don't have one, because I don't think my children would be able to resist the temptation of constant television. (And besides, since I don't want to watch one, what's the point of having one?) It's not that I want them never to watch television--they have friends, after all. I want them to get to the point where they are reasonable enough to think about television, without having the bad habit of watching it all the time, since this sort of habit would make it hard for them ever to get to the point where they could really understand and freely and intelligently choose.
(Habit isn't the perfect word, but I don't want to get too technical here.)
But the whole thing about the influence of environment means that what is easier depends on where you are, at least to some extent. If you need to go a quarter mile, walking is by far the easiest way. For a trip of ten miles, driving is easier, if there's a paved road. Over rough country, I would guess that a horse is easier than driving or bicycling. If there are cliffs and large rocks involved, climbing might be the easiest way. So the thing to do, it seems to me, is to arrange our surroundings so that what is better, at least as far as we can determine, is also easier. And when you do things that are better--this is really general, but anyway--then doing these things becomes easier, and we're better able to judge what actually is the best way to do a thing. The more I bike, the easier it is to go long distances, and the better I become at judging how to ride safely, pick a good route, etc.
Not that it ever becomes really easy to hop on your bike when you're tired, and it's really hot or cold, and you have to carry a bunch of weight. A hard choice, but less hard, the more often you make it.
For me, having my parents fifteen miles away makes it harder. I did ride there with my daughter on the tandem once, but I don't see the whole family making the trip for a long time. They'd come and see us, so maybe it doesn't really matter.