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.

Let’s say that life is... See more

I so often meet people who focused on maximizing a narrow set of life outcomes instead of forming their identity, and that becomes much harder to do when you’re locked in mid-career. Youth is a privilege: use it to experiment, test the boundaries of the world, and make stupid mistakes.

In short, if one presents high agency as the supreme good, rather than as one value within a broader ecology of values, they risk becoming an agentic fool.

So, what is “wise agency”?

To modify the above definition of agency, it is:

Taking the right action toward getting the right things done, despite complex (and clear, complicated, chaotic, or

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