Agency
Ideas around agency, aka the sense of control that you feel in your life + your capacity to influence your own thoughts and behavior
unoptimal and
Agency
Sometimes you will exhibit reflexive agency - agency as an automatic response to the situation you’re in. You have a preference, you have the ability to satisfy it, so you do that. What could be more natural?
David R. MacIver • Learning to exercise agency
You're not powerless, you're just under attack.
rivalvoices.substack.com
Learned helplessness, the failure to escape shock induced by uncontrollable aversive events, was discovered half a century ago. Seligman and Maier (1967) theorized that animals learned that outcomes were independent of their responses—that nothing they did mattered – and that this learning undermined trying to escape. The mechanism of learned... See more
Learned Helplessness at Fifty: Insights from Neuroscience
Musings on agency part 2:
Find your feedback loops (gradients) that feel like eating chocolate ice cream.
But also find your feedback loops that also feel like doing an insanely hot sweat lodge with a group of good friends that have your back.
Christopher Smederx.comthread
Agency is the skill that built the world around you, an all-purpose life intensifier that lets you make your corner of it more like what you want it to be, whether that’s professional, relational, aesthetic, whatever. Build a better mousetrap. Have an enviable marriage. Start a country. No one is born with it, everyone can learn it, and it’s never... See more