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
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
just be your self & do your own thing
discover & express your unique self
forge your own path
make your own rules
Stuart Evans and • 24 cards
"Can we really just do things?"
>Yes, we can!
"Can you teach me how? Is there a school?"
>Yes, we are making it happen! TPOT Agency School is happening next year!
Workshops & Talks by:
@gptbrooke, @sashachapin, @nosilverv, @kaseyklimes, @leahprime,... See more
Christopher Smederx.comthread
You could theoretically change your life at any moment. Move here, date that person, work on that startup, write that blog, dye your hair, adopt a dog. Should I stay, should I go? I don’t know if this agency is freedom or burden. Perhaps all the best things are both.
Nixtwitter.comreminds me of the charles broskoski quote that goes something like... and when nobody waits for you at night, and when nobody calls you in the morning - do you call that freedom or loneliness?
So this is what I’ll call a “failure of agency” - a case where there is a clear preference, and a clear ability to act on that preference, but no action occurs (and possibly the idea that you could act never even occurs to you).
David R. MacIver • Learning to exercise agency
This is what nobody tells you: commitment is an act of agency . We often get through life comforted by the thought that we have the ability to make choices, theoretically . But there's a peculiar magic that happens when you actually exercise that choice: the world shifts on its axis. You make active choices about how to use your time, energy, and... See more
Sindhu Shivaprasad • commitment is an act of agency
we now have growing reasons to suspect that agency is a genuine natural phenomenon. Biology could stop being so coy about it if only we had a proper theory of how it arises. Unfortunately, no such thing currently exists, but there’s increasing optimism that a theory of agency can be found – and, moreover, that it’s not necessarily unique to living... See more
Philip Ball • Life With Purpose
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
Giving kids the agency to follow their own curiosity seems right for a lot of obvious reasons: it will make them happier, intrinsic motivation will fuel them to learn more, it keeps the youthful flame burning instead of extinguishing it with routine...But it’s also important for a less obvious reason, one that will be even more important as things... See more