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
“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
tomcritchlow.com • Ways of Seeing
Nobody wakes up feeling great and ready to get after it every day. The work is accepting your feelings and taking them along for the ride. It requires equal parts grace and grit, self-discipline and self-compassion.
Keep showing up.
Brad Stulbergtwitter.comIn my way of thinking, radical agency is about finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they’re annoying or unpleasant. These don’t always surface in awareness to the point one is actually choosing -- often they live in a cloud of aversion that strategically obscures the tradeoff.
Cate Hall • How to Be More Agentic
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.comEven if you work inside the system, you don’t need to let the system work inside of you. And if you summon up the boldness to go in a different direction, others might even surprise you by following along.
"Multitasking Isn't Progress—It's What Wild Animals Do for Survival"
Sensing into all the above takes, the following aspects are clearly at play: taking action, getting things done, and navigating complex constraints. Hence, my newly provisional definition of the hard-to-define word agency is:
High agency, as opposed to low agency, occurs when... See more
Taking action toward getting things done despite complex constraints.
High agency, as opposed to low agency, occurs when... See more