on agency & what it gives us
people seem to be surprisingly bad at using their freedom to feel good, and especially at using it to feel deeply good.
Sarah Perry • Deep Laziness
To make diagnosis something ‘empowering’, the first step is to completely break it apart and acknowledge all of its potential different and conflicting functions. Diagnosis can give you access to community, or cut you off from community. It can give you access to benefits, or it can bar you from income through employment. It could get you your
... See moreDazed • This New Book Asks Whether Capitalism Really Is Driving Us All Crazy
Power may really live in the hands of just 50 people, but the way it is experienced in our day-to-day lives is far more diffuse. It’s the constant feeling that anywhere and at any given moment, at the nail salon, the grocery store, while you’re walking from your front door to your car, something is being siphoned away from you without you knowing.
... See moreJasmine Bina • Repricing the Human Experience
The narrative out there right now is revolution - taking back power, reclaiming control and forcing accountability. And maybe that happens. But I also know that revolution requires collective action at scale, and what I'm seeing in peoples’ behaviors and everyday choices is a very different kind of revolution.
People are leaving. The natural
... See moreJasmine Bina • Repricing the Human Experience
The power of agency is, in practice, the power to build: to direct our intelligence toward the work of understanding the world and adapting it to our needs. It’s how we impose a purposeful order on nature’s chaos.
Gena Gorlin • Death is the default
taste can be a practice—a result, even, of living authentically.
Haley Nahman • #176: Accounting for taste
Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to do something differently from, or in addition to, the events that simply happen to you.
Simon Sarris • The Most Precious Resource Is Agency
Most of us really have very little say in the diagnoses we get, even though we all carry a lot of self-knowledge about our bodies and minds. You see the impacts of this a lot when it comes to mental health and neurodivergence: people fighting for years for their autism or ADHD diagnosis, or trying to get an eating disorder diagnosis despite their
... See moreDazed • This New Book Asks Whether Capitalism Really Is Driving Us All Crazy
Meanwhile, the majority of “normals” (to borrow a term from the sci-fi film Gattaca) are expected to take orders, complete tasks, stand in line, clock in and out . . . punctually, obediently, subserviently. No dancing in the halls, and certainly no daydreaming about a world put together differently.