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
The people I admire most have a way of escaping the bubble of culture. Sometimes via religion; sometimes via old books; sometimes via time in nature. Without such an escape, propaganda wins. You stop thinking for yourself. Modern delusions grow into an all-consuming mind virus.
David Perellx.com
Frequent lamenting about how bad things are (in politics or relationships or other culture gripes) is mostly a way for people to avoid responsibility for what they can change. If you constantly repeat that everything is bad, it lets your ego off the hook for doing nothing.
Simon Sarrisx.com
prompt (agency) and evals (taste) will rule everything around us
In ordinary language, we frequently speak of machinery or ideas ‘doing’ things in our lives. But they do nothing. People – human persons – produce, operate and apply their creations. The problem with assigning agency, even informally, to the nonhuman is that this disguises the strength of human control, limited though it is in other respects. It... See more
Bennett Gilbert • On hope, philosophical personalism and Martin Luther King Jr | Aeon Essays
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
Musings on agency:
Everyone has command of one self, if one is okay doing what is pleasurable to them in the moment.
The effort to eat a pint of chocolate ice cream is enjoyed.
The effort to do tedious task XYZ is not.
Christopher Smederx.comthread