Agency

In my way of thinking, radical agency is about finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they’re annoying or unpleasant. These don’t always surface in awareness to the point one is actually choosing -- often they live in a cloud of aversion that strategically obscures the tradeoff.

Sensing into all the above takes, the following aspects are clearly at play: taking action, getting things done, and navigating complex constraints. Hence, my newly provisional definition of the hard-to-define word agency is:

Taking action toward getting things done despite complex constraints.

High agency, as opposed to low agency, occurs when... See more

In ordinary language, we frequently speak of machinery or ideas ‘doing’ things in our lives. But they do nothing. People – human persons – produce, operate and apply their creations. The problem with assigning agency, even informally, to the nonhuman is that this disguises the strength of human control, limited though it is in other respects. It... See more

“You can just do things.”

Essentially, one does not have to wait for permission to do what they feel called to do—they can just do it, which is more true now than ever with AI agents at their beck and call.

You will never be fully ready and there will never be a perfect time. It’s genuinely not about waiting for the right time to do something when you’re ready, it’s about doing things before you’re ready just to make them exist. Those quotes that say “make it exist first, you can make it good later” are very true.