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Notes -
So, I wouldn't go with "Men wearing pants" as an explanatory example, I would go with something more absolutely limiting, such as the state of the art of our food crops.
Corn is a great crop at least partially because we chose to spend thousands of generations selectively breeding. There was an original reason why corn was chosen over other available crops at the time- that's the historical contingency, and then there's the modern fact that corn is a better crop than other similar plants that we never modified. But- Some of those plants might be able to produce better outcomes- might have produced better outcomes- had we known about them and chosen them all those epochs ago when we chose corn.
Our Plateau here is the different species of corn. They are different, but many are all relatively similar. You can take your pick of corn based dishes, choose different species of corn to make different varieties of those dishes, and you can selectively breed our current corn to get other, slightly different varieties of corn. We are in a sense, married to these historical choices now. Not to a single point, a single species of corn, but to the general area of the state of the art of corn that we currently occupy. A 'plateau' of viability.
But purely hypothetically, there may well be a viable food crop 100k generations down the line of, say, parsely. If we run into a civilization that bred parsely into a different supercrop, that would be a different plateau. But to get to the world where we are using that supercrop from this world, would be a 100k generation ordeal. Similarly, to those in that world, it would be an ordeal to produce our supercorn.
So this is the sense in which the plateau is arbitrary. There are other hypothetical stable ways of life out there. But we are stuck on a metaphorical island. Cultural Nomadism could get us to these 'islands' of culture, but the journey may be hard and costly and uncertain, and in many cases is inordinately expensive.
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