“*Capacity to both see and act on all the degrees o freedom we actually have”
From the way I understood it, “agency” is not really about “controlling ur life”, but more like steering it and molding it to the life u want to live.
Having low agency indicates that you most likely go with the flow of life (be it ur parents, the economy, ur friends, ur job, ur boss..) & just drift like a passenger, so basically life happens to you.
Having high agency is actually grabbing the steering wheel. U actively choose for yourself on what to do, so you make life happen. Basically you’re growing the capacity to initiate change.
Independence is a prerequisite for agency
Being able to make your own decisions in life requires independence. You must be independent enough to trust your own judgement in things over what’s supposedly given to you.
you can be selective agentic & u might not know it
3 fields - career, relationship with others, relationship with self (health, sleep etc)
on a “non-agentic” area, u most likely have a bias stopping u to be agentic. for example, anxiety → you can be just “it is what it is” & stick with it because maybe u tried therapy long time ago and failed… OR you can actually try different meds, talking to people about solutions, check on health and nutrition, research, etc.
“a person did/learned/discovered that so there is no a prioi reason that I cannot do so myself”
Everything is learnable. Have the right kind of mind & ur able to step into a field and really learn it and work it. Use this, explore, and it will be most likely highly rewarding.
Random thoughts
I haven’t really thought about agency until I randomly read the substack article above and now it’s stuck on my mind.
areas where i am agentic - probably my academics and career
areas that I have very low agency - my personal health, relationships with people.
I realized that im my friend group, i was always just following the flow lol, and i would rarely initiate to do things together (i think this is influenced by how introverted i am). But recently, I’ve been thinking that just the act of initiating social events together to do something means a lot. It kinda feels empowering? in a way haha.
I realized I have bias towards several areas
I realized I unconsciously believed that i couldn’t fix these/learn these
(chronic) brain fog + (chronic) stuffy nose 😭
Now that i think about it, i don’t have to be like this. I can just literally start working on these, as obvious as that sounds. Esp for health I could look up threads/research/videos to actually do them?? for a veeeery long time i’ve just accepted them as part of me and i didn’t really do much to make things better.
This holds especially true for brain fog… which i believe i struggled with ever since COVID19. I don’t want to say that the effects are permanent and that its long lasting (because believing that this is the case just… makes me incredibly depressed) but deep down… i can’t deny it. Nothing has been the same after COVID unfortunately😭
but all right, time to fix this shit..
Literally as i am writing this i will look for related doctors and make appointments lol. and prob to lots of extensive personal research on brain fog
be a better problem solver
being in paul allen school really humbled me, to a point where i had intense imposter syndrome & just downright believed that i couldn’t do it. so this naturally impacted my confidence in all things stem, like leetcode, assignments, doing technical projects, etc etc.
But right now looking back, i think i was just not in the right timing. And it was quite true that i was underprepared… However now i know how to improve myself and be better; i am in a pretty good spot as of today (2/15/26) and i can say that i can actually understand shit if i just make the effort →learning + understanding things
Reminds me of using ai
I think there is an interesting correlation between delegating ai more and more power on the daily things and agency.
There was this one striking moment for me - i started to write more and more emails and reports with ai, and one day i just decided to reply to a short email by myself and realized that the sentences & words didn’t come out well & they looked funny. I became baaad at writing, like actually - it was becoz i always let an LLM do these tasks instead of me. Again, sounds obvious on paper, but it was a moment for me lol. (ever since then i try to write things by myself)
Same thing with asking it to make flashcards so i can copy and paste, or summarizing a long article so i can skim through it. I feel like continuing this will lead u to let the LLM to actively do more things, like decision making on projects/tasks, choosing which tool to use & thinking of the tradeoffs, deciding what to do on a weekend, etc.
Then you are essentially letting the LLM decide everything for u. Which means, that since you let AI do all the work and the decision making, you have low agency.
Im not saying that u shouldn’t use LLMs at all (i think they are a great tool for learning and research!) but more like u should be careful so that it won’t take away ur critical thinking skills.