Agency can be formally defined as the subjective feeling of having control over one’s actions and their consequences…Put differently, you don’t feel as though life is just happening to you, with your only choice being to sit back and accept it all. Instead, you feel as though you are an active participant in your life; you are making things happen.

The first step towards being “high agency” is always the same. You cannot take effective action towards bending the world to your desire until you know, in detail, what it is that you desire.

You always have three options: you can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you could leave it but not leaving it and not accepting it. That struggle or aversion is responsible for most of our misery. The phrase I probably use the most ... See more

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

... See more