Thought provoking

Often, agency is almost gentle—an attunement to the world and the self, a feeling out the details of reality, and a finding of the path of least resistance. There is sometimes considerable force involved, hard work, but it is like the force of a river being pulled toward the sea.

Agency, as I see it, is an amalgamation of two skills, or mental dispositions: autonomy and efficacy.

1. Agency requires the capacity to formulate autonomous goals in life—the capacity to dig inside and figure out what wants to happen through you, no matter how strange or wrong it seems to others. In other words, it requires autonomy (which was what I

... See more

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

—Marcel Proust

The third and deepest kinds of friendship, according to Aristotle, are friendships of virtue . That is, you like a person because of their character. They might be fun, they might be useful, but even if they aren’t, you like them anyway. It is what the marriage vows are getting at with the line: “To have and to hold, from this day forward, for... See more

Which brings me to the central confusion, people lump confidence and self-esteem together because they’ve been conditioned to believe both are psychological trophies to be earned through suffering, introspection, accomplishment, or a well-timed rebrand.

But confidence is an action; self-esteem is an element.

Confidence moves. Self-esteem exists.

Conf... See more

Still, there’s a dangerous comfort in being chosen. It feels easier. It spares you the loneliness of self-definition. Someone else does the selecting, and you just step into the role. That’s why so many people stay in half-alive relationships or misaligned jobs.... inertia, not ignorance. Being chosen relieves you of the burden of choosing. It... See more

The difference between being chosen and being loved is subtle but seismic. Being chosen flatters the ego. Being loved nourishes the soul. The former depends on conditions; the latter survives despite them. To be chosen is to be desired for what you display. To be loved is to be accepted for what you reveal when the display collapses.

Feminism told us to choose ourselves, but capitalism quickly monetised that too. “Self-love” became another product category. You can now buy your autonomy in skincare form. It’s genius, really, turning emancipation into retail therapy. The rhetoric of empowerment was rebranded into the same old consumer loop: You are enough... once you purchase... See more

Originality lives in the spaces abandoned by approval. To be unchosen is to be unobserved, and therefore unrepeatable. You stop contorting to fit into someone else’s criteria of desirability and start listening for subtler signals: the sound of your own life resuming its pulse, the small tug of instinct that doesn’t need validation to make sense.