on agency & what it gives us
in a country where childcare costs over £7,000 a year, for just a part-time nursery place. It’s little wonder that we have turned to frivolous spending on a micro level (termed ‘treat brain’) we can afford. So, yes, that means our bottomless brunches and trips to Ibiza and online shopping binges. Let us blow what we can, on what we can.
marie-claire chappet • ‘What’s the point?’ syndrome, and why we all feel so disconnected right now
When you apply possibility thinkingin your daily life, it can give you a powerful sense of agency. It can help you find innovative solutions to actually do what you want to do, in one form or another.
Constance de Saint Laurent • How to use ‘possibility thinking’ | Psyche Guides
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
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
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
Adaptation work builds agency. It counters the attitude of ‘There’s nothing I can do’/‘I’m too small to make a difference.’ This is because, unlike decarbonisation work, it is by definition focused, local, concrete and tangible. One then reaches the point of people being able to say to themselves something like this: ‘Our climate concern isn’t just
... See moreRupert Read • Welcome to the Chaoscene
the most important thing you can do to transform the world is to act. Taking action is a practice of hope. Experience and meaning are derived from doing.
Kelly Hayes • Let This Radicalize You
“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
How do we encourage those around us to be active dreamers without coming off as people with their heads in the clouds? The phrase “dream a little” can be so hard to even imagine as people who have been so conditioned to not push past the corners of their own imaginations.