Agency

our ability to bind our future selves to a future is what makes us agentic, rather than just moment-to-moment responders. Maybe the total inability to commit is a deeper kind of temporal fragmentation—the self splintering into a thousand disconnected moments instead of flowing through time as a continuous “I”. It’s fascinating to turn this idea... See more

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

David Foster Wallace,

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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

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.

I’ve come to believe that agency — the ability to start, decide, act, adapt, and follow through — is rising in importance as AI continues to spread. We’re used to seeing raw intelligence as the ultimate advantage, but something is shifting. Intelligence is now everywhere. It’s on tap. It’s no longer scarce. The rare thing now is the ability and... See more

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?

Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms?

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