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
Roughly, agency is the capacity to act to satisfy some preference. This breaks down into three parts: 1. The capacity to act. 2. Possessing preferences over outcomes of those actions. 3. Being able to choose to use the former to satisfy the latter.
David R. MacIver • Learning to exercise agency
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.comagency is acting with the belief that one can attain something by committing to it. Agency is a Stoic value, as it encourages one to focus on what is under their control—taking action, self-belief, and commitment—unlike success, which requires something outside of one’s control, mainly recognition from others.
Peter N Limberg • Be Agentic, Stupid
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” – Not Viktor Frankl
Michael Ashcroft • How to Make Unfixated Choices
you can just do things
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.