Agency

exert your taste on the world to live in a reality you’ve consciously created https://t.co/wKR6LMKBRo

It has become hard to be intentional about the future — to imagine and shape the worlds we want to live in — because the modern state rarely assumes any role in doing that or in encouraging us to do it either.

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

in order to develop agency, one needs to be psychologically ready to embrace it (i.e., change their worldview) once they spontaneously discover it. For instance, abandoning a victim mentality and being open to taking risks.

In short, if one presents high agency as the supreme good, rather than as one value within a broader ecology of values, they risk becoming an agentic fool.

So, what is “wise agency”?

To modify the above definition of agency, it is:

Taking the right action toward getting the right things done, despite complex (and clear, complicated, chaotic, or

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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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Agency itself is not necessarily a good thing. It becomes a good thing as a toolkit, developed by people who are also high in conscientiousness, who want good things for the world, and who might otherwise be constrained by narrow perspectives on what counts as socially acceptable action.

When you’re losing a game you don’t even want to play, or forcing a fit into a form you don’t want to be in, the best thing to do is to stop playing and go find your shape.