Agency

Anxiety can also significantly impair agency - it’s much harder to act when you’re worried that everything is going to go terribly, horribly, wrong, if you do, so anxiety in a specific area will often reduce your agency in that area (e.g. anxiety about your technical skills will make you less willing to try things at work, social anxiety will make

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the fear of commitment is really a failure of agency, of taking full responsibility for our choices and their consequences. A kind of learned helplessness dressed up as freedom. I think that’s why commitment feels so heavy to some people. You’re accepting full authorship of something, and you can't blame circumstances or timing or compatibility for... See more

Different academic disciplines have different takes on the word “agency”:

• Philosophy sees agency as the capacity to act intentionally and rationally to bring about change in the world.


• Psychology views agency as a person’s capacity to exert control over their environment and experience a sense of ownership over their actions.


• Sociology understands

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Agency is a value, not a virtue . As noted in “The Most Boring Value” entry about discipline, virtue is a value that is always good:

I understand virtue as a value that is always good. Being disciplined is not always good; it can be foolish, something the self-help gurus fail to tell you. Foolish discipline is overworking until burnout, “crushing”

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