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
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
... See moreDavid R. MacIver • Learning to exercise agency
On the one end, you have fully reflexive agency in which you act spontaneously to satisfy your preferences, on the other end you have total obedience to some authority who tells you how to be happy, and in the middle is prompted agency.
David R. MacIver • Learning to exercise agency
tl;dr: exercising your agency is good for morale, not exercising it is bad.
via - alexey guzey
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... See more
Andrew Conner • Making the Internet Work for You: YouTube
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