On agency

Birch in a forest, Gustav Klimt, 1903

Last May, when our oldest daughter Maud turned seven, I wrote:

I wish I had a book that I could put in her hands, and it helps her learn what many never learn, or learn too late, namely, that the possibilities are much bigger than you think, that you can live more deeply, and truly, and that you can solve almost any problem if you put your mind to it. A book about how to handle being sentenced to freedom, and to handle it effectively, and authentically, and responsibly.

It is late May again, Maud is eight now, and I’ve decided to write down a glimpse of the book I imagined.

Last year, when I talked about learning “how to handle being sentenced to freedom,” a phrase I borrowed from Sartre, I meant roughly what people these days call “cultivating high agency.” But I need to define my words, since some ways the phrase high agency is used feel foreign to me, and depressing.

Agency, as I see it, is an amalgamation of two skills, or mental dispositions: autonomy and efficacy.

1. Agency requires the capacity to formulate autonomous goals in life—the capacity to dig inside and figure out what wants to happen through you, no matter how strange or wrong it seems to others. In other words, it requires autonomy (which was what I was getting at when I said “authentically, and responsibly”).

2. Agency also requires the ability and willingness to pursue those goals. It requires the “will to know,” the drive to see reality as it is, so you can manipulate it deftly and solve the problems you want to solve, instead of fooling yourself that certain problems are “unsolvable.” In other words, efficacy (“handle it effectively”).

Or phrased negatively, the opposite of agency can mean one of two things. Either (1) doing what you are “supposed to do,” playing social games that do not align with what, on reflection, seems valuable to you and/or (2) being passive or ineffective in the face of problems (assuming your problems can’t be solved, that someone else should solve them, or working on things that do not in a meaningful way address the problem.)

I wrote about ways of figuring out what you genuinely care about in this post:

Agency is often framed as a hard-edged, type-A, aggressive approach. But over the last