Agency

“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

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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How can I thrive while operating contrary to dominant social and cultural trends?

The experts all agree: the trend, they say, is your friend.

All you need to do is identify it, and then you ride it out. And, true enough, I’ve watched thousands of people make a buck doing just that. If you are active in the arts, that may be the single most obvious... See more

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