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
Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.... See more
David Foster Wallace,
Nix 🕊 • carry yourself lightly
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”... See more
Peter N Limberg • Be Agentic, Stupid
On the other side of creative aliveness, there is flatness. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, about what happens when our worlds go flat. The dynamism we lose, the emotional urges we suppress, the original impulses we become too afraid to nurture.
On the running path recently, a song came on. It was by Eminem. His music is not my choice for... See more
On the running path recently, a song came on. It was by Eminem. His music is not my choice for... See more
Leandra Medine Cohen • Notes from the running path
Leandra on anti-flatness
learn to notice what your awareness is doing, because a collapse in awareness is a clear sign that you are losing the capacity to make a new choice, becoming more like a train that can only run on pre-laid tracks rather than, let’s say, a drone that could go anywhere. If you notice this, first re-expand your awareness by noticing more of the space... See more
Michael Ashcroft • How to Make Unfixated Choices
FOMO is good. Being plugged in is good. There is valuable info at all levels from twitter gossip to philosophy books. You should stay plugged in. You can manage anxiety and beat the House without resorting to shaming social platforms into managing attention for you. That's a terrible yielding of agency.