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 main paper I've been working on for the last 3 years is out: "Value Capture"! It's about the harms of taking on external metrics and rankings as your own core values.
The argument: you're outsourcing your values. It's fast, but then your values won't be tailored to you.🧵:
C Thi Nguyenx.comVery simply put: don’t let action be the only thing separating you from those that are building the life you dream of. If you can take a small step today, do it. I promise it could be the one little tiny thing that kicks off a domino effect leading to great things later on.
Erifili Gounari • literally just do things
How to spot high agency people:
1. Weird teenage hobbies - Teenage years are the hardest time to go against social pressures. If they can go against the crowd as a teenager, they can go against the crowd as an adult.
2. Energy distortion field - If you meet with them when… Show more
Sometimes you will exhibit reflexive agency - agency as an automatic response to the situation you’re in. You have a preference, you have the ability to satisfy it, so you do that. What could be more natural?
David R. MacIver • Learning to exercise agency
you are a self-modifying machine, a particle with partial control over its own future, and it pays to know what all the buttons do. I’ve heard many people describe to me what sound like levers in their own souls, but I know very few people who realize that they can pull on them deliberately, if they want to.
Duncan Sabien • The Levers of the Soul
Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms?
