You (probably) have all the agency you need.

Published

24 January 2024

There’s a new personality trait going round. It’s fashionable, and, like botox, everyone wants to get more of it. Ok. Ok. The personality trait is only fashionable in an internet subculture of people who live and work in Silicon Valley, or who, inexplicably, want to be like people who live and work in Silicon Valley. But it’s still a big deal, because those kinds of people decide how the rest of us live tomorrow. So we’d better pay attention to it.

The personality trait? Agency. More precisely, High Agency. If that doesn’t clear things up, think of agency as a capacity to do things, and, crucially, get the same things done. All manner of good things in life stem from having high agency: higher paying, more interesting, jobs; not just jobs: you’ll be the employer instead of the employee; if working isn’t your thing, then high agency will send you on adventures to far off places and give you stories to tell. So if you don’t have it, then getting more agency should be your number one personal development goal.

This all sounds great, too good to be true. The truth is that there’s a contingent of people for whom more agency isn’t that helpful because they’ve got enough already. I’m going to assume that you, whoever is reading this, you can get up and shower and are sufficiently far in your career that you suggest and take on tasks for yourself. You generally make whatever it is you work on better in some way, and you’re proud of that. But anyway you still worry that you don’t have enough agency. And if you’re the sort of person to worry that you don’t have enough agency, then you (probably) have enough agency to get what you want in life. All this anxiety about agency is just another stick to beat yourself with.

So I’m letting you off the hook: you don’t need to worry so much. Your worries are probably well founded. You missed out on some things in life, and they still haunt you. You think that if only you were different, then things would be better for you. I’m here to tell you that if you were different, then things would just be different. Maybe better, maybe worse. You’d just be saddled with a different set of problems. None of which ‘more agency’ would solve.

If you want, here’s 7 reasons to stop beating yourself up.

You have a gratitude problem.

That is, you have all the agency for the life you’re living. I don’t know you. Maybe you do spend all day in bed. But I’m guessing you’ve got to get up and generate enough money to put a roof over your head and food on the table. So you’ve got get out of bed and look presentable and I guess you’re doing that.

Or maybe you’ve chosen a different path and are travelling the open road, so you’ve got to find a ride to the next town or someplace to stay for the night. And I guess if that’s what you’re doing, then you have all the agency you need to do it.

So give yourself a break! You don’t need agency, you need gratitude. Stepping back to count your blessings is the mature thing to do. We can do ourselves down, and through that do the life we’re living down. We can’t see the agency we have. More insidiously this causes us to take on more, instead of jettisoning what has stopped serving us. Take a moment to see all the things you are doing, see the agency you have. Consider how it could be applied differently.

And you probably reserves of agency hiding behind the couch for whatever it is you’ll be doing next. People get married and have kids and found businesses and switch jobs and whatever. There’s no reason you couldn’t do it to. You just have to see it as within your grasp.

You lack knowledge.

Maybe your doing a lot of stuff to get things going, but nothing’s working. You’re doing 100 ‘Do 100 things’ but it you haven’t struck gold yet. So you keep on ploughing the same furrow, only hope keeping you going on day after day.

But instead maybe you don’t know what to do, and you’re using ‘agency’ as an excuse not to do anything. And look, I get it. Doing things, things nobody has done before, is hard. That’s no reason to sit around and wish violence on yourself. You’ve got to out and find the thing that works. That’s where your agency has to go.

You lack courage.

Maybe agency is a different word for courage; but the rub is, for the brave, agency is just their day to day. Sometimes the only way to do something is to actually do it. The secret that nobody has been telling you, is that it felt awful when they were doing it. That guy asking their crush out. Felt awful. The actors onstage. Probably didn’t feel great 5 minutes before the performance. The point is, they’re doing it.

I’m sure you’ve done things which didn’t feel great in the moment. Everybody has to talk in public, or say sorry, or deal with a difficult customer. All you need do is remember that, and start doing some more uncomfortable stuff in future. You have the agency, just not the courage to face discomfort.

You aren’t rich.

Being rich buys you a lot of opportunities, because you can afford a lot of failure. Being rich also buys you a lot of time. Time saved cooking, and cleaning up. Time saved washing clothes, and time saved sweeping the house. You can use this saved time to do other things, things which look, to an outsider, like you have a lot of agency.

Being rich means you can take a break between jobs. That means you can consider what you really want to do. There’s no ineffible force pushing you to compromise just so that you can keep a roof over your head. Outsiders can overlook this when looking at your career.

You might will interpret your lack of (career, relationship, whatever) success as a lack of ambition, but being rich allows you to be more ambitious. Taking time between roles let’s you consider what the role brings to you, and which roles you can bring your best to. But if necessity means that you can’t take a break like someone with a million in the bank and a home paid off.

You have real commitments.

It not fashionable to say so, because it can look like pandering or playing the victim. And our society likes the stories of people who have won, rather than people still in the arena. But you have real circumstances and commitments that prevent you from doing exactly what you want. Maybe you’re caring for an aging relative, so you can’t throw your time into a business. Or you have kids, and can’t just move across the country. Or you are ill, and your never going to get ‘better’ and this has real consequences for how you live your life and what you can do with your time.

When we think of agency as mastery over outcomes, we compare ourselves to people doing better than us. But we don’t see the things others have shrugged off. It’s easier to conquer the world when that’s all you have to do; but if you’ve got kids, or parents to look after, well maybe you just can’t do it.

It was never going to work.

Look, I’m sorry. I don’t want to shit on your dreams. Hopes and expectations and desires are something to cherish. Being a little delusional is key to getting anything done. We wouldn’t have vaccines and lates and sofas and strawberries if humans had truly believed they were foredoomed.

But also, the world only needs so many coffee shops. Most startups fail, even if they pivot. Even good ideas come to history too little, too late. Maybe it just was never going to work.

This is devastating, but it’s not about you. Truly, it’s not. It’s just that the world wants something different from you.