Or phrased negatively, the opposite of agency can mean one of two things. Either (1) doing what you are “supposed to do,” playing social games that do not align with what, on reflection, seems valuable to you and/or (2) being passive or ineffective in the face of problems (assuming your problems can’t be solved, that someone else should solve them,... See more

my orientation to the problem became fixed in time at that point of low agency, and it never occurred to me to revisit it as my capacity for action increased.

I think we are all like this. People are not just high-agency or low-agency in a global sense, across their entire lives. Instead, people are selectively agentic.

Let’s say that life is... See more

Agency, as I see it, is an amalgamation of two skills, or mental dispositions: autonomy and efficacy.

Agency requires the capacity to formulate autonomous goals in life—the capacity to dig inside and figure out what wants to happen through you, no matter how strange or wrong it seems to others. In other words, it requires autonomy (which was what I... See more