Agency
Ideas around agency, aka the sense of control that you feel in your life + your capacity to influence your own thoughts and behavior
by unoptimal and · updated 20d ago
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.
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David Foster Wallace,from carry yourself lightly by Nix 🕊
Alara added 1y ago
- You gotta be understanding who you are and where you're at in life right now. You absolutely have to be figuring out how you can increase your capacity to influence your own thoughts and behaviors as well as your faith in your ability to handle a wide range of tasks and situations.
Agencymaxxing happens through doing things. You can think all you wa... See moreStuart Evans added 10mo ago
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.
from Against Waldenponding by Venkatesh Rao
sari added 1y ago
Another example of this sort of thing that I am constantly frustrated with is something that I experience as other people being very lacking in curiosity, but from the inside is probably more a lack of reflexive agency over their understanding of the world: It seems like people just stay confused about things that matter to them, and I find this ut
... See morefrom Learning to exercise agency by David R. MacIver
Stuart Evans added 1y ago
- “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
from Ways of Seeing by tomcritchlow.com
rob hardy added 4mo ago
- Don’t underestimate the power of vision and direction. These are irresistible forces, able to transform what might appear to be unconquerable obstacles into traversable pathways and expanding opportunities. Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination a... See more
from 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan Peterson
sari added 9mo ago
- Reminder that a sense of agency means feeling like you have control over your actions and their consequences . I think people tend to forget that second part; owning your mistakes and their consequences is extremely difficult, which might be a motivating factor for some people to adopt victim complexes. (A victim complex is learned!)
from agency: it's only human by sundus
Stuart Evans added 1y ago
- you are a self-modifying machine, a particle with partial control over its own future, and it pays to know what all the buttons do. I’ve heard many people describe to me what sound like levers in their own souls, but I know very few people who realize that they can pull on them deliberately, if they want to.
from The Levers of the Soul by Duncan Sabien
Stuart Evans added 1y ago
- First, be clear about your intentions. For myself, I want to maximize learning and improving myself, and minimize “zombie entertainment”. This is when we’re caught in a pattern of consuming from a firehose feed for entertainment, without intentionality. It’s a fake flow state: time passes quickly and the world fades away, but there’s no cognitive d... See more
from Making the Internet Work for You: YouTube by Andrew Conner
sari added 1y ago