High agency

If you asked, about physical reads, “what would someone much better than me do to improve,” you would probably come up with an answer similar to mine: read everything on the topic, then on adjacent topics, then on vaguely related topics; watch hundreds of hours of streams on silent with hole cards covered, trying to find patterns; find other people... See more

I think what happened is this: When the stalker entered my life, I was at a low point in personal capacity — broke, alone, addled, etc. My approach towards him at that point (ignore, hoping he’d stop) was the only one that seemed available given my spiritual and psychological resources at the time. But my orientation to the problem became fixed in ... See more

I’d recommend assuming there’s some area of your life where you are, without realizing it, frozen in time, and that locating it matters quite a bit. Look across the three theaters of your life: work, relationships, and self-relationship, and take note of the biggest issues you face. Know that you might be looking for something that doesn’t feel lik... See more

people who are being selectively agentic often have a kind of faulty sensory appreciation. Perhaps relationships feel hard for you, they take willpower, so it’s tempting to believe that you’re Actually Trying, that you’ve brought the full weight of your genius to bear on the problem. You might even take some pride in the struggle. Like rigid postur... See more

It seems like, by default, you are stuck with whatever level of resourcefulness you brought to a problem the first time you encountered it and failed to fix it.

Let’s say you tried therapy when you were 20, and it didn’t help with your high levels of anxiety. When you think about your anxiety, as the years go by, you think, “hard problem, tried the... See more

I think we are all like this. People are not just high-agency or low-agency in a global sense, across their entire lives. Instead, people are selectively agentic.

Let’s say that life is divided up into three theaters: work, relationships with others (all kinds) and relationship to self (physical health, introspection, emotional development, all of ... See more

I like the approach Sholto Douglas expressed in his interview with Dwarkesh Patel:

If I’m trying to write some code and something isn't working, even if it’s in another part of the code base, I’ll often just go in and fix that thing or at least hack it together to be able to get results. [...] I think that's arguably the most important quality in al

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