whether you are “behind” or “ahead” is a delusion. others should serve as inspiration and a little healthy rivalry to fuel to your fire, but only one competitor can stop you: yourself. everything else is a distraction—a way to attribute your internal agency to something external:
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.
The mismatch between past and present doesn’t seem trivial to me — if the “you” of today can so blithely disregard the “you” of yesterday, then it follows that the “you” I’m talking to now might very well not be the one who shows up for our date tomorrow. There’s a kind of unpredictable change that seems to lie outside of the virtues of growth and... See more
Being agentic is a gritty journey of trial and error, non-glamorous, and does not result in gold stars. The last thing one needs to be agentic is to appear right in contexts where being right cannot be accurately assessed. One needs to risk being wrong, which also means appearing wrong—a prospect that often translates to appearing stupid, one of... See more
biggest joke of my life… after years and years of trying so hard, i can just unclench the sense of doing anything and
1. my “willpower” increases dramatically
2. i get better at pretty much everything
(this is not the same thing as non-coercion!)
Like the Stoics and Daoists, I want to put my focus on wisdom so that a “wise agency” can emerge. This would mean people take the right action and get the right things done, in whatever domain they find themselves.