One antidote is to allow yourself to imagine what it might feel like to know you'd never fully get on top of your work, never become a really disciplined exerciser or healthy eater, never resolve the personal issue you feel defines your life's troubles. What if I'll always feel behind with my email? What if listening attentively to other people wil

The world doesn’t happen  to  us; it is shaped by us. More people now have access to simple tools that allow them to “program,” or modify, the world around them. Teaching kids that the world is programmable – whether it’s through actual coding, games like Roblox and Minecraft, encouraging them to ask for what they want, or even white-hat

" Younger generations didn’t become “more technical”, per se – if anything, they’re probably less technically literate overall. It’s  programming  itself that became easier, because there are now so many tools and layers of abstraction available that make coding a much more trivial practice than before."

If you believe that the world is shaped by your and others’ actions, then the climate crisis or other global catastrophic risk don’t look quite so scary: they’re an opportunity to do something meaningful.

If Gen X and Millennials grew up with a “digital divide,” perhaps Gen Z will face an “agentic divide”: those who believe they have the power to change their circumstances, versus those who do not. 

The opposite of agency is learned helplessness. If people believe that we can’t do very much to stop the world’s problems, it’s unsurprising that they’d be terrified to bring children into the world. But this seems like a mental trap that we can, and should, teach people to resist falling into. As  Clare Coffey writes  in “Failure to Cop

" I want to highlight how the value of coding isn’t really about teaching programming skills. It’s about teaching agency."