For the past couple years, I’ve been thinking a lot about the downsides to “agency”. It was something I considered to be a virtue (that I had a decent amount of!), but I kept messing up in ways that seemed related to it. I now think much of the problem comes from being high in one part of agency and low in another.
Let’s look at two components1 of agency:
There’s self-knowledge, the extremely hard problem of “what do I actually, genuinely want in my life? What do I care about?” This is difficult because different social contexts try to overwrite your “actual wants”. Things like Focusing, embodiment, Hamming Circles, psychedelics, and Sleepawake are all ways to try to get better self-knowledge.
Self-knowledge without a way to actually get what you want leads to something I saw at Sleepawake, where a couple people there were like “yeah, this was nice and helpful and healing, but a lot of this is aimed at people who already have a lot of their ~normal life demands like career and money figured out, and i’m fuckin broke and would like to learn to be less so”.
(I wonder what an event/retreat around getting what you want out of your own life by leaning into MTG black and broadly being More Strategic would look like. I think I have a lot of this thing but I’m not sure how to teach it. Incidentally, this is part of the rationale for an upcoming papal election LARP I’m helping out with)
And there’s Path To Victory2—how good are you at finding routes/otherwise greyed-out-options that get you The Things You Want? This is very tactical/concrete. Strategy games are almost purely path-to-victory—you have an objective laid out for you, and your goal is to optimize for that objective through the environment. For similar flavor, see also Humans Are Not Automatically Strategic.
Path To Victory is quite useful! It’s the thing that makes me an effective problem-solver in my consulting work, where people give me problems and trust me to Figure It Out. But, there are many ways this can be a poor character trait to have.
As a toy example—in the first LARP I ever did, I thought “hmm, what is the best way for me to accomplish my goals”? I ended up murdering half the cast in the first 40 minutes—it is not very fulfilling for your character to die because I needed a gun to kill the wizards, and you had a gun. And like, now I need to be asked explicitly not to ruin LARPs/to avoid “playing to win” in certain ways, because uncontrolled Path To Victory can be a problem.
There are two ways a lack of self knowledge can hurt you, if you have strong Path To Victory.
The consequences of your actions aren’t fully legible to you (see also, Seeing Like A State, plus an upcoming piece of mine on arrogance and invisible consequences, and Yudkowsky on, if you optimize your system heavily for variable X, you probably end up setting variables Y and Z to weird extreme values, so you better hope you’re optimizing for the entirety of your value function. [here is a suboptimal cite for this, I couldn’t find a better one in time])
You don’t fully understand what you want and are accidentally optimizing unconsciously for that.
A lot of wisdom, to me, is avoiding these failure modes caused by low-self knowledge, or by not fully understanding the consequences of your actions.
There’s a buddy of mine, let’s call him James, who’s pretty similar to me in some ways—notably, high path-to-victory but lower on self-knowledge. He had a realization, while on mushrooms and cuddling a girl, that I found quite useful for understanding a major failure mode here.
She was clear that she liked him and was enjoying the cuddling, but didn’t want to kiss him/otherwise escalate. His brain, out of sheer desire/desperation/etc, kept trying to find ways to get her to kiss him and otherwise escalate the situation, even though that would have been a really bad idea. Normally, this process wasn’t legible to him, and if you’d asked him he’d be like “obviously I wouldn’t try to escalate in this situation”, but on mushrooms it became extremely clear that he was still, on some level, trying to problem-solve his way into something she didn’t want.
To quote James: “I feel like fucking Cyclops from the X-Men, where I just kinda destroy whatever I look at. It’s really useful in combat or for cutting down trees, but then I go to a bar to try to pick up women and I cut ‘em in half by accident!”
It’s really hard to fix this. For one, if you’re suffering from lack of self-knowledge, you might be doing a really good job of maintaining a fiction where you are fine and not causing problems for yourself and others, and it might take a major external shock to disillusion you. (I wrote about this in Piercing The Delusion).
Plus, even if you’ve become aware of the unconscious desire, you still have to reconcile it with what you want upon reflection, which is really difficult to do. (this is the step that I’m at, myself). I expect that the things I listed for improving self-knowledge will help, especially when used in the context of the thing you’re trying to improve at/observe yourself during (although, that strikes me as difficult and dangerous. Ah well).
If you’re looking for a conclusion with a handy Call To Action, don’t worry—I’ll write a followup piece a decade from now, once I’ve figured this out.
This comes from Henrik Karlsson’s excellent On Agency, which inspired this essay. The particular section I’m cribbing from:
Agency, as I see it, is an amalgamation of two skills, or mental dispositions: autonomy and efficacy.
1. Agency requires the capacity to formulate autonomous goals in life—the capacity to dig inside and figure out what wants to happen through you, no matter how strange or wrong it seems to others. In other words, it requires autonomy (which was what I was getting at when I said “authentically, and responsibly”).
2. Agency also requires the ability and willingness to pursue those goals. It requires the “will to know,” the drive to see reality as it is, so you can manipulate it deftly and solve the problems you want to solve, instead of fooling yourself that certain problems are “unsolvable.” In other words, efficacy (“handle it effectively”).1
Or phrased negatively, the opposite of agency can mean one of two things. Either (1) doing what you are “supposed to do,” playing social games that do not align with what, on reflection, seems valuable to you and/or (2) being passive or ineffective in the face of problems (assuming your problems can’t be solved, that someone else should solve them, or working on things that do not in a meaningful way address the problem.)
Interesting corollary: often, a component of people “lacking the path to victory thing” is them tracking additional tradeoffs/cost. Extreme case: it’s “a lot easier” to be “agentic” if you don’t care/selectively care about people/consequences, eg psychopaths.
Of course, it’s all complicated. This stuff is likely fairly contextual too, see: Cate post on willpower. idt character traits are infinitely general or specific, exactly.
This is a useful framing. I kinda model my stoner era as increasing my Self Knowledge at the cost of heavily decreasing my Path To Victory