On Having Agency
June 19, 2024
3-Item Status
Current location: Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
Reading: What’s Our Problem? by Tim Urban
Listening: Palpitations by HUNNY BUZZ
Quick Notes
Home: I’m back to Milwaukee! It was wonderful catching up with some friends, recording a pod, and doing a live event in SoCal, and it was great seeing my family and having the chance to help out a bit up in Seattle. It’s also nice to be home—I’m getting back into the swing of cooking and working and working out and going to sleep in the same bed each night (at a reasonable hour!), and thus far surviving the wild heat wave we’re experiencing up here, this week
Poll: This week’s poll is about music discovery, and more specifically, whether you primarily learn about new music from humans you personally know, humans you don’t know, software (algorithmic suggestions on Spotify and YouTube, for instance), or if you’re not super-keen on new music discovery.
(If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-Item Status and/or Quick Notes about what’s happening in your life.)
On Having Agency
One way of thinking about being a conscious, cognitively capable being is through the lens of agency.
In this context, “agency” refers to our capacity to take action and implement change, usually to our environments, and usually purposefully—but also internally and sometimes with little forethought.
Whether intentional or accidental, and whether impactful on a personal scale or something beyond that (societal, civilizational, planetary), having agency means we can do stuff that affects other things, and the scope, scale, and nature of our agency is informed by all sorts of variables, ranging from our physical faculties and cerebral wherewithal, to the collection of inputs and influences we’re born with and accumulate over the course of our lives.
By acting upon the world around me—stomping on a plant or making a stranger smile, for instance—I change things, for better, worse, or neutral. And those changes can ripple outward, causing even more rippling, compounding changes (that plant dying, maybe, which impacts the whole of its ecosystem, or that now-smiling person going on to make a flurry of other people smile).
Most of us have an intuitive sense of our personal capacity to act with agency, that capacity bolstered by our various strengths, support systems, and advantages, and tempered by our relative weaknesses, societal limitations, and environmental impediments.
One of the most jarring aspects of aging, to me, has been the forced reassessment of my agentic scope and potency.
Some of my competencies have been amplified (in a few cases greatly) by my slow but persistent accumulation of relationships, resources, knowledge, and know-how.
Others have been diminished, though, partly due to the biological abatements of simply existing, but also because of the social connotations of growing older.
At some point we’re no longer perceived to be youthful and vibrant, with our whole lives (and infinite potential) ahead of us, and we’re thus recategorized by other people and the systems that structure the modern world (which in turn tends to force an internal re-categorization, as well).
Some of these changes are barely noticeable, others are fundamental and life-rewiring, but all of them can change the way we think about things and tweak how we interface with the world.
None of which is particularly revelatory: things change as we get older. This is something we all know, even if we don’t tend to fixate on it for maybe obvious reasons.
But I’ve found that shifting my focus from, “things are changing,” to, “the relationship between me and the things over which I have influence are changing,” has allowed me to notice the more vital (to me) aspects of these shifts, rather than fixating on the (arguably) more superficial aspects of the same.
This has in turn helped me recognize something that I think will be increasingly important as I (hopefully) continue to accrue more years of life: I’m still me, even if my proficiencies change.
I can choose to pull back from life and become despondent as my powers wax and wane, or I can act to counter, adjust, rebalance, and make new investments to remain of the world, rather than dejectedly retreating from it.
—
(My new book is about growing older with purpose and intent, if you’d like to read more about this sort of thing.)
Interesting Links
To Pee or Not to Pee? That Is a Question for the Bladder—and the Brain
Scientists used to think that our bladders were ruled by a relatively straightforward reflex—an “on-off” switch between storing urine and letting it go. “Now we realize it’s much more complex than that,” says Valentino, now director of the division of neuroscience and behavior at the National Institute of Drug Abuse. An intricate network of brain regions that contribute to functions like decision-making, social interactions, and awareness of our body’s internal state, also called interoception, participates in making the call.
What Would You Do With a Robotic Third Thumb?
Once equipped via a wrist strap, the robotic digit sits on the side of a palm opposite of a user’s biological thumb and resembles a sixth, elongated finger. Users operate the thumb by pressing down on a pair of sensors underneath each big toe. Pressure applied by the right toe moves The Third Thumb side to side, while pressure from the left toe moves it up and down. The controls are wireless and proportional, so faster movement form the toes will result in similarly quick movement with the thumb. Easing up on toe pressure will release the thumb back to its original position.
Fundamentally, I think, the Tamagotchi instilled in me a deep fear of unilateral responsibility over another living thing – if you are given total power and control over the life of something else, you have an utterly terrifying burden. Forget to feed it? Dead. Don’t clean its virtual pen often enough? Dead. The list of ways to kill your ‘gotchi feels exponentially longer and more flexible than the list of ways you have to keep it alive, and that slim margin for error lives rent-free in my head today in the form of an utter refusal to ever own a live plant or an animal that resides inside a cage or tank. My teenage Tamagotchi was a sinner in the hands of a forgetful and flawed God, and nothing has ever made me more afraid than being in that position.
(If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.)
Poll
The previous poll (on book-medium preferences) came out heavily in favor of paperbacks.
This week, I’d love to know how you discover new music:
Outro
I’m trying to buy new pants, and as seems to be the case with unfortunate frequency, these days, my previous go-to brands have been gobbled up by private equity firms that are now reducing their quality, slapping logos on everything, and basically trying to milk these companies for as much money as possible before everyone stops shopping there.
I’m hoping against hope local thrift stores help me out of this jam, but I would also appreciate your suggestions for well-made, ideally logo-free, simple men’s clothing (that hopefully doesn’t cost a fortune) if you have any to offer.
What have you been up to, lately? Anything interesting happening in the news, where you live? Drop me a message about whatever’s on your mind, and/or take a moment to introduce yourself—I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)
I love that line! "I’m still me, even if my proficiencies change." A helpful reminder.
Also, the article about the "Terror of the Tamagotchi" is gold! I remember my primary school banned Tamagotchi's at school because we were so intent on keeping them alive.
I have a friend who started sending me random song links over a year ago. Just from that, I've found many bands I would never have considered before. The two that come to mind are Big Thief and Manchester Orchestra. And me and this friend are not even super close - he's just bored and sending stuff out into the void. It's been so wonderful. :)