Learning to exercise agency

I think often what’s going on with prompted agency is that it gives you permission to act, and many people aren’t good at acting without permission.

Another example of this sort of thing that I am constantly frustrated with is something that I experience as other people being very lacking in curiosity, but from the inside is probably more a lack of reflexive agency over their understanding of the world: It seems like people just stay confused about things that matter to them, and I find this ut

Sometimes you will exhibit reflexive agency - agency as an automatic response to the situation you’re in. You have a preference, you have the ability to satisfy it, so you do that. What could be more natural?

So this is what I’ll call a “failure of agency” - a case where there is a clear preference, and a clear ability to act on that preference, but no action occurs (and possibly the idea that you could act never even occurs to you).

In the other direction, I think there are skills and dispositions which increase your agency in general. Practical wisdom, the skill of knowing that to do, is generally agency-increasing because it makes it easier to find paths to act on your preferences, so gets you used to acting in general.

Anxiety can also significantly impair agency - it’s much harder to act when you’re worried that everything is going to go terribly, horribly, wrong, if you do, so anxiety in a specific area will often reduce your agency in that area (e.g. anxiety about your technical skills will make you less willing to try things at work, social anxiety will make

On the one end, you have fully reflexive agency in which you act spontaneously to satisfy your preferences, on the other end you have total obedience to some authority who tells you how to be happy, and in the middle is prompted agency.

Roughly, agency is the capacity to act to satisfy some preference. This breaks down into three parts: 1. The capacity to act. 2. Possessing preferences over outcomes of those actions. 3. Being able to choose to use the former to satisfy the latter.

The opposite to reflexive agency is prompted agency - agency which only becomes available given some prompt to action. “That does seem like a problem. Have you tried solving it?” is my only-half-joking prompt I use with people: It’s something that highlights the failure of agency, in a way that makes people aware that action is an option available

So, if you want to increase your agency: Have conversations with others, or do journaling, about what you can do to improve your circumstances, and then act on the conclusions from that.