Do you think you could help me with something, how did you identify specific events or choices, in your recent past, where more agency was required?
I’m very confident that I also would benefit in life from my exercising more agency. However it’s a vague confidence, I can’t offer any evidence or specific examples. When I try to list situations where I could have acted with more agency, there’s not any example where it’s clear that agency would have probably made things better, or at least had a better chance of a better outcome than making things worse. I can’t think of any recent retrospective examples where the difference between what I got, and what seems like a potentially better outcome, was simply not using enough agency. (As opposed to “oh, I wish I knew that earlier”—I think there’s an important distinction to be made between hindsight that comes form knowing what you couldn’t have possibly known at the time, and not acting successfully on the information you had at the time).
One example off the top of my head—I need to buy a book for study. Correct me if I’m wrong, but acting with more agency would have been buying it straight away. But I’ve procrastinated so far, and would my life be materially any different yet? No. Not at all. If I continue to procrastinate past a certain point, it will have negative consequences. But so far, none. Next week? Eh, even then it may be fine.
That’s the first, most immediate, pressing example that comes to mind.
idk exactly how, they just pop up to my mind easily. maybe because i am very aware of the things i’m disappointed about not having done. also, i can consult my todo list, which is effectively a list of things i will never do because i don’t have enough agency. like i’m going to set a timer for 10 minutes and write as many things as i can think of:
i’ve known that exercise is really important since forever but never really getting around to doing it
i keep procrastinating scheduling meetings with people i should meet with
i often have entire months of very low productivity where it’s a slog to do anything and in the past it never occurred to me to take any of that time off even though i have way more PTO than i need
there are many instances where i finished doing a thing and then realized i should have started doing some other thing in parallel instead of waiting on it.
there will be multiple times a month where i will realize my life would be easier if i had planned ahead even a little bit. for example i will forget to book a flight until the last minute, at which point it’s harder and more expensive to get good seats, even though i knew my travel plans much earlier.
i will often do things the hard way for way too long, even after i know there could be a better way, because i’m too used to the old process and don’t want to expend the trivial amount of effort needed to check if there’s a better way. for example it took me an embarassingly long time before i learned to use a debugger, because i was used to print-statement debugging
i often procrastinate things because there is a trivial amount of inconvenience required to do it. like it took me years to get around to various medical interventions which really only required me to do some googling and then talk to a doctor twice and whatever.
hopefully these examples help you think of similar things in your life
Do you think you could help me with something, how did you identify specific events or choices, in your recent past, where more agency was required?
I’m very confident that I also would benefit in life from my exercising more agency. However it’s a vague confidence, I can’t offer any evidence or specific examples. When I try to list situations where I could have acted with more agency, there’s not any example where it’s clear that agency would have probably made things better, or at least had a better chance of a better outcome than making things worse. I can’t think of any recent retrospective examples where the difference between what I got, and what seems like a potentially better outcome, was simply not using enough agency. (As opposed to “oh, I wish I knew that earlier”—I think there’s an important distinction to be made between hindsight that comes form knowing what you couldn’t have possibly known at the time, and not acting successfully on the information you had at the time).
One example off the top of my head—I need to buy a book for study. Correct me if I’m wrong, but acting with more agency would have been buying it straight away. But I’ve procrastinated so far, and would my life be materially any different yet? No. Not at all. If I continue to procrastinate past a certain point, it will have negative consequences. But so far, none. Next week? Eh, even then it may be fine.
That’s the first, most immediate, pressing example that comes to mind.
How did you remember yours?
idk exactly how, they just pop up to my mind easily. maybe because i am very aware of the things i’m disappointed about not having done. also, i can consult my todo list, which is effectively a list of things i will never do because i don’t have enough agency. like i’m going to set a timer for 10 minutes and write as many things as i can think of:
i’ve known that exercise is really important since forever but never really getting around to doing it
i keep procrastinating scheduling meetings with people i should meet with
i often have entire months of very low productivity where it’s a slog to do anything and in the past it never occurred to me to take any of that time off even though i have way more PTO than i need
there are many instances where i finished doing a thing and then realized i should have started doing some other thing in parallel instead of waiting on it.
there will be multiple times a month where i will realize my life would be easier if i had planned ahead even a little bit. for example i will forget to book a flight until the last minute, at which point it’s harder and more expensive to get good seats, even though i knew my travel plans much earlier.
i will often do things the hard way for way too long, even after i know there could be a better way, because i’m too used to the old process and don’t want to expend the trivial amount of effort needed to check if there’s a better way. for example it took me an embarassingly long time before i learned to use a debugger, because i was used to print-statement debugging
i often procrastinate things because there is a trivial amount of inconvenience required to do it. like it took me years to get around to various medical interventions which really only required me to do some googling and then talk to a doctor twice and whatever.
hopefully these examples help you think of similar things in your life