Cultivating Agency

"If “grit” – the desire to persevere when faced with a challenge, popularized by psychologist Angela Duckworth – has been the human trait  du jour  of the last fifteen-odd years, I suspect that “agency” – a belief in one’s ability to influence their circumstances – could be the defining trait of the next generation."

If our social attitudes towards agency are as important as they seem, we should measure its prevalence in the general population, then find ways to track it over time. I grew up in the heady halcyon days of globalism, where celebrities sang “We Are the World” [ 3 ] and Whitney Houston proclaimed that  “I believe the children are our future.”

If you believe that the world’s problems are solved by people, then having children doesn’t seem like a waste of resources; it seems, in fact, like the most good you could do in the world.

" Younger generations didn’t become “more technical”, per se – if anything, they’re probably less technically literate overall. It’s  programming  itself that became easier, because there are now so many tools and layers of abstraction available that make coding a much more trivial practice than before."

" Despite our devices becoming easier to use over the last few decades, technical proficiency appears to be more widely dispersed across younger populations, as opposed to older generations, where it is viewed as a specialized skill reserved for a small percentage of the population. However, I’d guess that young programmers typically know less abou

If you believe that the world is shaped by your and others’ actions, then the climate crisis or other global catastrophic risk don’t look quite so scary: they’re an opportunity to do something meaningful.

My sense is that those with a strong sense of personal agency don’t always realize that not everyone shares this position.

The opposite of agency is learned helplessness. If people believe that we can’t do very much to stop the world’s problems, it’s unsurprising that they’d be terrified to bring children into the world. But this seems like a mental trap that we can, and should, teach people to resist falling into. As  Clare Coffey writes  in “Failure to Cop

If Gen X and Millennials grew up with a “digital divide,” perhaps Gen Z will face an “agentic divide”: those who believe they have the power to change their circumstances, versus those who do not.