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
It has become hard to be intentional about the future — to imagine and shape the worlds we want to live in — because the modern state rarely assumes any role in doing that or in encouraging us to do it either.
Substack • Imagining a World Beyond Consumerism
we now have growing reasons to suspect that agency is a genuine natural phenomenon. Biology could stop being so coy about it if only we had a proper theory of how it arises. Unfortunately, no such thing currently exists, but there’s increasing optimism that a theory of agency can be found – and, moreover, that it’s not necessarily unique to living... See more
Philip Ball • Life With Purpose
When you're agencymaxxing, others become more interested in helping
you because you're a good investment. You, the agencymaxxer, apply a
multiplier to others' help so that their help goes further than if
they applied that help to someone who wastes it by not helping
themself. People like when their help makes a meaningful difference
and they don't like... See more
you because you're a good investment. You, the agencymaxxer, apply a
multiplier to others' help so that their help goes further than if
they applied that help to someone who wastes it by not helping
themself. People like when their help makes a meaningful difference
and they don't like... See more
You Need to Be Agencymaxxing
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.
Cate Hall • How to Be More Agentic
So, if you want to increase your agency: Have conversations with others, or do journaling, about what you can do to improve your circumstances, and then act on the conclusions from that.
David R. MacIver • Learning to exercise agency
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.... See more
David Foster Wallace,