On Agency

I wish I had a book that I could put in her hands, and it helps her learn what many never learn, or learn too late, namely, that the possibilities are much bigger than you think, that you can live more deeply, and truly, and that you can solve almost any problem if you put your mind to it. A book about how to handle being sentenced to freedom, and ... 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.

And everything is like that.

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

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?

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

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

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

I’ve lived long enough to have learned that most things are actually doable if you care enough. I rarely feel blocked in the way I did when I was younger. But it is interesting that it was something I had to learn: that problems are solveable; that if I direct my attention to the problem and learn to understand it, and act on what I learn, the prob... 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