Building Agency
Fundamental → Tactical → Strategic
This post was written as a submission for the blog prize by Effective Ideas. I was planning to make something like this for a long time and I am really glad to write on the topic. NB: This text is full of referenced tweets — consider them threads to pull on and explore.
My personal definition of agency is the weighed score of all actions that have paid off in the way they were planned to, with greater weights assigned to those aimed farther into the future. Like in machine learning, we cannot simply optimize for that score numerically due to the sheer vastness and multimodality of our decision space, so we have to use hacks to become more agentic. Before we delve into a more structured and theoretical part, here are some of those hacks that work nicely out of hand:
As paradoxical as it may sound, you can outsource some of your agency. For instance, Alcoholics Anonymous do exactly this, you come there and use the power of the community to set yourself straight. Interpret that as you wish: it may be an evolutionary hook that makes us tribal or it may be not that, but the fact is that a body of people is often helpful when you need to get things done.
Another way to exploit this is to join more communities with wildly different agendas. Each group’s preferences will tug yours in some direction which may help your set of beliefs become more elaborate and robust. Plus, it may boost various useful skills.
Similarly, you can make use of behavioral frameworks. Month-long challenges like Inktober, personal commitments, you name it. My favorite frame is “do it 100 times” where you commit to do something 100 times without deadlines or any other modifiers. Just do it. 100 times.
Learn and mix more concepts from a variety of fields. It’s always great to apply patterns from software architecture to how you schedule your day, or a machine learning concept to your explanation of agency. A bonus that’s often overlooked is that you become eloquent with complex ideas, especially when you need to communicate them to several people from different domains.
Employ your ability to change faster than culture.
Recognize your petty tyrants and become unswayed by them. Petty tyrants are those who exercise their power to distract you or make you suffer. Commonly, those are people but in a broader sense, even a crossroads with a messy street light pattern may be your personal tyrant. Never let them get you.
Detect and unmake imaginary rules you have imposed on yourself.
You are allowed to do many more things than you think. Conversely, you are allowed not to do many things (honestly, almost all). Feel free to abandon past commitments if they don’t serve your current goals. In the end, there is no achievement for a perfect track record.
Before we get to the wordy part, here’s the last quick hint. Simply thinking about agency increases it. (Don’t overdo it though.)
Primordial Soup of Awareness
Everything is built on a certain substrate. All agentic skills, both short- and long-term, rest on the foundation of basic, elemental awareness. That awareness is being grown, step by step, not achieved in a quick rush. We can speed up that growth, though. As boring as it may sound, strong willpower and sense of control root from the body, not the other way around. Healthy diet, regular exercise, and good sleep will do 80% of the work. The best source I can recommend on all this is the Huberman Lab podcast. But this is just the first step.
Meditation should have been the second fundamental but let me move it to the third place. I believe that what’s more important is to read more books and, specifically, stories with inspiring characters. Part of the character’s agency is yours — if you’re ready to absorb it. Well-written heroes never fully fade in your mind, and we can decide whose voice to amplify. As for the other, non-character ones, everybody has their lists but let me give a few more books that have worked miracles on my agency:
The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch;
Diaspora by Greg Egan;
The Foundation series by Isaac Asimov;
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins;
Dune by Frank Herbert;
Mother of Learning by Domagoj Kurmaic.
All of the works above are very different which is a part of the appeal but they also share one trait that I value a lot: each of these books has its distinct vision of the evolution of the sense of purpose in an individual. I recommend them fervently. With this short digression being resolved, let’s continue.
Meditation. First, I must disclaim that I’m pretty new to the trade. Second, I will leave the description of traditional and advanced techniques to the professionals. My recommendations comprise three forms of (what may be called) meditation:
Listen to X, where X can be your breath, your body, the soundscape of your city, a dripping faucet, or the birds singing in the trees.
Let things go. The first form (especially when you’re listening to your body or your motivations) will provide you with many things you could let go. Bodily tension is one of those things, and getting rid of it is worth a lot.
Wander aimlessly. I’m not talking about going for a walk, I’m suggesting you to spend a day without any plan, any intention to do something useful, nothing. Just sit and watch the clouds go by.
With all that partly mastered and regularly attended to, the last and strongest enemy that muddies the waters in our awareness pond is fear. Fear the mind-killer. Fear the little-death. There is no simple recipe to fight off fear, and you probably don’t want to get rid of it completely but anyway, fear is only strong around your most sensitive spots. Most of the damage it does is collateral. Deconstructing why something is scary often dispels its detrimental effect because it actually only seems scary.
Immediate Alertness
When you are focused on something, you tend to ignore everything else. Like in this famous selective attention experiment. But your attention doesn’t have to be a narrow spotlight. You can expand it and be more aware of your surroundings. That will give you the sense of presence, easier time reacting to unforeseen stimuli, and a bunch of other nice perks. The contracted to expanded awareness pipeline is often taught as Alexander Technique, and one of the best websites on it is this one.
Not only modern psychologists have elaborated on spatial awareness. In the 17th century, a legendary Japanese swordsman and philosopher Miyamoto Musashi wrote The Book of Five Rings where he laid out his principles of the perfect warrior. He praises the skill of being keenly aware of one’s immediate environment as the greatest virtue, and he also gives valuable advice on timing, styles of movement, honesty, and many other things. Y’know, this is yet another book I wholeheartedly recommend.
The epitome of how to whet your awareness in warrior cultures comes in the form of treating death as your best advisor. “Be aware of the fact that you may die the next second, and you will become invincible.” Not an easy path for most contemporary folks but in case you’re interested in this approach, I wrote about it here with a little more detail and here with a different frame.
Long-term Agency
A wise man once said, "You are only ever as agentic as your political theory says is the upper bound of rational agency." What is the most agentic thing you can imagine? How does it relate to ambition? What’s the most ambitious endeavor humanity could undertake? These are all open questions but pondering on them reveals a lot about your values and the ways you set and pursue your goals. Acting in a world full of benevolent cooperators is noticeably different from striving on your own. The choice of this frame is up to you, but if a little hint is allowed, the setup involving a lot of cooperation manifests a much more ambitious (and agentic) variant of the future.
Let’s zoom out and look again at fear. All those things fear suppresses but not targets, they can be mapped to points in your decision space. The more of them are disabled, the weaker is your ability to maneuver. And it being capped means that a larger subspace of alternatives will be locked in the more distant regions of the future. Once you free up one move you’ve been afraid of, that unlocks ten moves a year from now and a hundred moves two years from now. And don’t worry about depleting the alternative timelines mine, it’s unrealistic for a human to exhaust it.
Finally, we can revisit spatial awareness and look at it from our high-ground strategic viewpoint. Why only expand your awareness in the physical space? You can take any abstract conceptual space and expand it there. I highly recommend 4X strategy games as a playground for this: you have to keep track of several spatial, conceptual, and temporal contexts while not allowing yourself to focus on any single one. Surely, many real-life experiences suit better as they are even more high-dimensional, but the upside of the game is that it allows you to test and experiment with novel approaches in a low-stakes environment.
Together, the methods described in this post form a powerful toolset that will boost your ability to analyze and control your life. I wish you to be ever increasingly alive and agentic!
PS. There are a couple of other frameworks I feel obligated to mention that didn’t make it into the text. Here they are: Internal Family Systems, Gendlin’s Focusing.
Could you please briefly explain why did these affect your agency? (In the post mb)
The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch;
Diaspora by Greg Egan;
The Foundation series by Isaac Asimov;
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins;
Dune by Frank Herbert;
Mother of Learning by Domagoj Kurmaic.