On Agency

And everything is like that.

Everything can be learned, everything can be understood and reshaped to fit our values.

there was something very profound about experiencing, again and again, that problems that seemed unsolvable and overwhelming to me were solvable, always solvable. It changed my priors.

If you have a clear understanding of the goal, there are often paths that lead there that are much shorter than the default path. A good question to ask is: what is the simplest solution that could possibly work?

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

1. 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

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When I think about friends of mine who struggle to be agentic, the problem isn’t precisely that they do the default thing; it’s that they fail to understand their problems and the solution space. They act in incoherent or ineffective ways because their mental model of the situation is too limited to show them a way out. They are not attuned enough ... See more

Most problems are solvable. But that doesn’t mean the solution will look like you hope it will; there will be trade offs. While Herzog made Signs of Life (1968), Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970), Fata Morgana (1971), Land of Silence and Darkness (1971), and Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), he had to live at home with his mom to afford making the f... See more

Why didn’t I see that it would be easy to fund essay writing in this way? It was, as I’ve said, partly a lack of imagination, partly a fear of looking stupid. But it was also that my thinking was bundled . I had conflated “being a writer” with “having a publisher” and “getting a salary from my writing.” These are not the same thing.

The best advice I can offer to those heading into the world of film is not to wait for the system to finance your projects and force it to decide your fate. If you can’t afford to make a million-dollar film, raise $10,000 and produce it yourself. That’s all you need to make a feature film these days. Beware of useless, bottom-rung secretarial jobs ... See more

I was sure I knew which problems were solvable and which weren’t—it is almost arrogant if you think about it. I gave up writing essays and instead wrote novels, because that was what publishers seemed to want. But I never cared for novels enough to get good at it. My writing fizzled out.

What made my decision especially unagentic is the fact that wh... See more