a pattern I’m noticing with smart, thoughtful people is that they usually know what their problems are, they know where those problems come from, they know the intellectual steps to solve them
but they get stuck there, in analysis mode, churning through insight after insight
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.