Agency

On the other side of creative aliveness, there is flatness. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, about what happens when our worlds go flat. The dynamism we lose, the emotional urges we suppress, the original impulses we become too afraid to nurture.

On the running path recently, a song came on. It was by Eminem. His music is not my choice for... See more

Agency itself is not necessarily a good thing. It becomes a good thing as a toolkit, developed by people who are also high in conscientiousness, who want good things for the world, and who might otherwise be constrained by narrow perspectives on what counts as socially acceptable action.

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

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”

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