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
thread
Pessimists see problems. They worry about what could go wrong in the future. Optimists see possibilities. They focus on what could go right in the future. Proactive people turn problems into possibilities. They give us reasons to be optimistic about the future.
Adam Granttwitter.com"Proactive people turn problems into possibilities. They give us reasons to be optimistic about the future."
You might have independence, and you might be an ambitious person—but if you can’t even begin to fathom creating and playing by your own rules, do you really have agency?
sundus • agency: it's only human
A popular narrative now casts all living entities as ‘machines’ built by genes, as Richard Dawkins called them. For Mayr, biology was unique among the sciences precisely because its objects of study possessed a program that encoded apparent purpose, design and agency into what they do. On this view, agency doesn’t actually manifest in the moment of... See more
Philip Ball • Life With Purpose
“A people or a class which is cut off from its own past is far less free to choose and to act as a people or a class than one that has been able to situate itself in history.” - John Berger
tomcritchlow.com • Ways of Seeing
building a world for yourself creates magnetism in the purest sense
Agency is a value, not a virtue . As noted in “The Most Boring Value” entry about discipline, virtue is a value that is always good:
I understand virtue as a value that is always good. Being disciplined is not always good; it can be foolish, something the self-help gurus fail to tell you. Foolish discipline is overworking until burnout, “crushing”... See more