You Are Happening To Life

Notes on High Agency

This post was inspired by George Mack's article on High Agency. 

Embodying High Agency

Embodying high agency will change your life.

It's the underlying thread of everything else.

What do all successful people have in common? High agency.

When I feel depressed, apathetic, in a rut, unable to feel good about my life. The common thread is low agency.

It's this low agency that shapes everything else. It's this low agency that makes me feel like life is happening to me as opposed to i'm happening to life.

There's an incredible joy in solving problems, in being resourceful, in on a mission, in moving fiercely towards what one is passionate about and standing up for oneself.

These are all high agency tactics.

The Components of Agency

We can pick apart 4 sub-components of agency:

• Resourcefulness

• Disagreeableness

• Bias towards action

• Clear thinking

Life Happens, But You Happen To It

We like to think that life is happening to us. That we are the victim of our circumstances. And yes life does happen to us, but we ALSO happen to it.

You have to look at both sides of the story and realize that there genuinely are aspects of life that are fully beyond your control AND you can control so much in your life.

When I get in depressed states I feel that I don't have agency over my life, I feel that life is happening to me, and I feel that things are unfair.

When I'm most happy I feel that I have agency over my life, that I'm happening to life, and that I have the drive and endurance to overcome any problem that life may throw at me.

I teeter back and forth constantly between these poles.

The Power of Decision

I'm writing this essay with the simple goal of embodying high agency.

The choice to write this essay was a result of a decision to become high agency.

It (almost) doesn't matter what you do, as long as you're doing it from a place of high agency, as long as you're DECIDING. Rather than letting the world decide for you.

I've been letting the world decide for me lately. Desparately trying to claw my way back into a state of high agency, and it's fucking difficult. But when it finally clicked and I realized how much better life is when lived from high agency it now feels effortless.

I understand WHY i'm taking action. It's not to reach a goal, it's to become the type of person that sees challenges and chooses to meet them with a problem solving, resilient, clear thinking, resourceful and honest mentality.

Decisiveness Matters

I was driving home from the office last night and had this insight.

Developing decisiveness is a LIFE AND DEATH situation.

And today I added onto that line of thinking by discovering that high agency and decisiveness are one and the same. A willingness to make decisions is a marker of having high agency. A fear of making the wrong decision is a marker of low agency. Whereas they may be different, I have yet to make the distinction between them.

Now being high agency is not the same as being anxious and just constantly doing things.

It means making a decision to do something and then sticking to your word (even if your word is with yourself).

High Agency in Practice

For example, maybe I notice that I'm becoming increasingly neurotic. The high agency thing to do would be to make the decision to sit on the cushion and meditate for a predetermined amount of time, then to set the timer and actually do the thing. Maybe it doesn't solve the problem, but the fact that it's the best strategy I had and I decided to commit to it and then to follow through. That is what it's like to embody high agency.

So at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how insignificant the action steps are that you're taking, as long as you're building high agency, you're on the right path.

When we take action we prove to ourselves that we can solve problems. That we can overcome obstacles and that we are happening to life. To act from the place of "I am happening to life" 24/7 is a really good existence.

No matter how bad life can get, we are happening to life. Just read Man's Search for Meaning and you'll see the epitome of high agency. Even in the depths of concentration camps, this man never fell into the mindset that life was happening to him.

Now life is nuanced. This isn't the answer to everything. But increasingly I believe that the drive and willingness to change things and to answer the call to life is more fundamental than any other self-help tactic or life improvement strategy that you may find.

Now I don’t care what your political opinions are of Elon. You have to admit, he is incredibly high agency. He’s obviously happening to life rather than the other way around.

The TL;DR of the whole essay is this: the good life requires high agency.