Agency can be formally defined as the subjective feeling of having control over one’s actions and their consequences…Put differently, you don’t feel as though life is just happening to you, with your only choice being to sit back and accept it all. Instead, you feel as though you are an active participant in your life; you are making things happen.
Musings on agency part 2:
Find your feedback loops (gradients) that feel like eating chocolate ice cream.
But also find your feedback loops that also feel like doing an insanely hot sweat lodge with a group of good friends that have your back.
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
Have faith: whatever the goal, the universe will provide lessons. Those lessons will either contain the growth to make you strong enough to accomplish the goal, or the wisdom to see a better goal.
A popular narrative now casts all living entities as ‘machines’ built by genes, as Richard Dawkins called them. For Mayr, biology was unique among the sciences precisely because its objects of study possessed a program that encoded apparent purpose, design and agency into what they do. On this view, agency doesn’t actually manifest in the moment of... See more
Because I don't want to be a monk. I don't want to go live in a cabin. I'm not gonna swear off Netflix or podcasts or whatever. I like this stuff. It's just a problem of excess and moderation, and I'm trying to figure out how to live my life in a way that is more deliberate, and less passive. I don’t want to just follow compulsive desire, which is... See more