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I. The Thing We Call Agency (And Why We’ve Got It All Wrong)
I’ve been grappling with “agency” lately. It points to something fundamental, something we seem to be collectively losing, or perhaps, never properly cultivated in the first place.
Andrej Karpathy recently wrote “Agency > Intelligence”. We’ve spent decades obsessing over IQ, SAT scores, and other proxies for raw cognitive horsepower, while neglecting a far more crucial, and rarer, resource: the ability and will to act effectively in the world.
From the same post
Agency, as a personality trait, refers to an individual’s capacity to take initiative, make decisions, and exert control over their actions and environment. It’s about being proactive rather than reactive—someone with high agency doesn’t just let life happen to them; they shape it…
But even this definition subtly reinforces a mistake. We treat agency as a trait, an inherent quality like height or handedness. This is the classic nature/nurture trap, and I’m increasingly convinced we’re on the wrong side of it.
Jesper Bylund, in his blog post on improving agency, argues that agency is not a trait, but a skill. A muscle. And, crucially, he posits that our default state is helplessness. We’re born utterly dependent. Agency is learned, painstakingly, through trial and error.
This inverts the usual narrative. We haven’t lost agency; we’re failing to build it. And the discussion surrounding Simon Sarris’s post, reveals just how deeply ingrained our misconceptions are.
II. Beyond the Bell Curve: Defining Your Own Game
The bell curve, while mathematically sound, subtly reinforces a limiting worldview. It suggests that most of us are, by definition, “average.” And in a culture obsessed with outliers, “average” becomes a euphemism for “inadequate.”
But life isn’t a single-variable optimization problem. We’re not all competing on one, universally accepted metric of “success.” Life is multi-dimensional. You can be the best something in your specific context, even if that context is incredibly niche. The best parent-coder-blogger-painter, within the unique circumstances of your life.
The crucial shift is to reject the imposed metric and define your own. This is where agency becomes a form of intelligence. Raw IQ is about solving pre-defined problems. Agency is about defining the problems worth solving in the first place.
Reject the “life script” of modern Western society. The well-trodden path of school, work, retirement, often feels like a gilded cage, trading vitality and potential for a deferred promise of leisure in old age.
Then there’s the undeniable role of privilege and risk. The ability to “try things,” to experiment, to fail without catastrophic consequences, is not equally distributed. A robust safety net, whether provided by family wealth or societal support, can be a powerful enabler of agency, allowing individuals to take risks that would otherwise be unthinkable.
The core question remains: How do we cultivate this vital skill, both in ourselves and in the next generation? Bylund offers practical exercises, but the broader discussion points to a more fundamental shift in perspective.
III. Cultivating Agency: Failure, Example, and Meaningful Action
Several key principles emerge. First, we need to embrace failure, not as a personal shortcoming, but as an essential component of learning and growth. This requires creating environments, both for children and adults, where experimentation is encouraged, where mistakes are not punished with irreversible consequences, and where the emphasis is on the process of learning, not on achieving pre-determined outcomes.
Second, we need to provide opportunities for meaningful action. The key is to engage in activities that have real-world consequences, that contribute to something larger than oneself, and that provide tangible, unambiguous feedback.
This is where our modern education system, with its emphasis on abstract knowledge, standardized testing, and simulated consequences, often falls short. It trains us to be good at following instructions, not at setting our own direction.
IV. The Uncomfortable Truth (And a Call to… Something)
The uncomfortable truth is that we are, collectively, doing a poor job of cultivating agency. We’re creating a society of well-credentialed, but often passive, consumers of pre-packaged experiences and narratives.
The solution isn’t a simple formula or a one-size-fits-all program. It’s a fundamental shift in mindset, a re-evaluation of our values, and a willingness to challenge the status quo. It starts with questioning, with rejecting imposed constraints, and with defining our own metrics of success.
Less structure, less top down mandates.
More room to breathe, to fail, to try, and to own the consequences of our choices.
This isn’t a call for anarchy, but for a more nuanced understanding of human development. It’s a recognition that agency is not a gift, but a skill. And like any skill, it requires practice, deliberate effort, and, above all, the freedom to fail and the resources to get back up and try again.
The most potent act of agency you can take today might be deceptively simple: Ask yourself, What do I genuinely want to do? Not what you should do, not what’s expected of you, but what you want to do. And then, with all the courage and uncertainty that entails, do it. It might be a small step, a seemingly insignificant deviation from the “life script.” But it might just be the first step towards building a life of genuine meaning and purpose, a life driven not by external pressures, but by your own, carefully cultivated, agency