Agency
Ideas around agency, aka the sense of control that you feel in your life + your capacity to influence your own thoughts and behavior
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Agency
What would your life look like if you actually had no agency around each problem you are currently facing. Describe the details of a zero agency life.
Joe Hudson • Tweet
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
Sindhu Shivaprasad • commitment is an act of agency
FOMO is good. Being plugged in is good. There is valuable info at all levels from twitter gossip to philosophy books. You should stay plugged in. You can manage anxiety and beat the House without resorting to shaming social platforms into managing attention for you. That's a terrible yielding of agency.
Venkatesh Rao • Against Waldenponding - by Venkatesh Rao Against Waldenponding
The first step towards being “high agency” is always the same. You cannot take effective action towards bending the world to your desire until you know, in detail, what it is that you desire.
Emmett Shearx.comsari and
Sometimes you will exhibit reflexive agency - agency as an automatic response to the situation you’re in. You have a preference, you have the ability to satisfy it, so you do that. What could be more natural?
David R. MacIver • Learning to exercise 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
I think often what’s going on with prompted agency is that it gives you permission to act, and many people aren’t good at acting without permission.
David R. MacIver • Learning to exercise agency
And I hear all sorts of interesting worries and anxieties from people. Lots of people say something like, “Oh, I would like to be more playful and passionate, but that’s not what the world cares about. The world only cares about what is popular, what is controversial, what makes money.” To which I say – so what? You don’t have to care about what... See more