on agency & what it gives us
When we do not know what we should hope for, we can hope to learn. There is room for what the philosopher Jonathan Lear calls “radical hope … directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is”.
Kieran Setiya • What’s the Use of Hope?
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
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
Often, hope works best alongside tools for proactively tackling future challenges. If our work becomes a catalysing force for people to imagine things they would not have been able to imagine otherwise and act upon that imagination, then that’s powerful, and for me, this is a slow form of critical activism.
Anab Jain • Calling for a More-Than-Human Politics
“I do think there is an issue in society at the moment with the lack of agency and autonomy for people,” she says. “Guerrilla gardening, even if it is just sowing something in a tree bed, it might not change the world – you might help some bees, you might bring joy to someone walking down the street – but you’re also reminding people, or awakening
... See moreDamien Gayle • ‘I Call It Botanarchy’: The Hackney Guerrilla Gardener Bringing Power to the People
“That feeling of helplessness comes out of the fact that all our agency is being channeled through these media,” he said. “We have these events that are ponderously large, like climate change or gun control, and to view them only through the lens of what happened or the abstraction of what people are saying strips away the notion of our agency and... See more
Charlie Warzel • How The Internet Is Like A Dying Star
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
If you have ever found yourself hoping for the future, yet, at times, it feels too big or too impossible; I hope you can carve out some space to dream in your own way and keep building on those dreams. Keep imagining what could be, even if you don’t know how it makes sense yet.
Morgan Harper Nichols • A Necessary Imagination
Humanity needs Gen Z’s ideas and dreams to shape the future, which means giving them a seat at the table