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Hello,
I feel buffeted by forces much greater than me. I'm trying to figure out how to remain true to my values and do work that matters when the current is this strong. This email is the first in a series working through that question.
In this email, I write about:
- Preserving a sense of agency as a practice
- A talk I plan to give at office hours on Wednesday
A Practice of Agency
I've been increasingly feeling like I don't have any agency with everything that's happening in the world, and I suspect I'm not alone.
Now, I normally view myself as a pretty high-agency person - how else do you stay self-employed for 10 years? But lately I find that feeling hard to hold onto, especially in a climate of widespread layoffs, a cooling job market, AI tools being forced into use by management, and leaders wreaking havoc with unwanted wars - just to limit the list to a manageable number of things.
Sometimes it's an internal feeling, other times there are messages floating around that seem to strip us of agency. Here are some common refrains:
- External authority: "We can't write tests, the boss won't let us, the schedule is too tight."
- Scale: "The scale of the problem is so big, individual actions don't matter. Only the actions of the biggest polluters matter."
- Inevitability: "The technology is coming whether we want it or not."
- Self-as-fixed: "I love this too much to let it go."
- Credentialism: "Who am I to…"
There's a unifying move across these refrains: a real constraint gets inflated into a total constraint. The schedule is tight, therefore spending time on automated tests is impossible. Problems dwarf individual action, therefore my individual action is irrelevant. My life has followed a pattern, therefore the pattern cannot change.
The agency-reducing version includes an implicit and debilitating "therefore" that doesn't follow from the premise: "real constraint X, therefore no moves available." The practice lies in interrupting the "therefore" and breaking the grammar.
Take "we can't write tests, the schedule is too tight." The time spent manually testing could be spent writing automated tests. Even one basic smoke test would be better than none. The constraint is real, our time is always limited. The conclusion doesn't follow.
I also notice that these refrains often smuggle in an assumption: the reason we act is to solve the problem. If you accept that framing, of course you give up - you won't fix the schedule pressure, you won't solve climate change, and you won't stop the industry from adopting AI. But the question of agency is not "will my action solve this?" Rather, it's "what kind of person am I going to be while this is happening?" The capacity to act as yourself in the face of a problem can remain intact regardless of the scale. This is a capacity that is worth preserving and strengthening.
Here's one of my practices of agency: I always pick up trash when I see it. I want to clean up the earth, and I know the problem is immense - after all, 33 billion tons of plastic enter the ocean in a year. But my own land is not clean. I find trash from previous owners, from illegal dumping decades ago, and even stuff blown in by the wind or brought by birds. The land, roads, and creeks also need cleaning. People still throw trash out of their car windows!
Three things strike me about this practice. First, my children pick up trash wherever they go too. It's totally normal for me to be at a park or a lake and have my kids suddenly run up to me with two handfuls of trash they've collected. Second, once I start picking up trash on a hike or a walk, everyone with me starts doing it too. And third, these acts are small compared to the problem, but removing the trash matters to the bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, fish, and people that live here.
Even if my actions are futile in the end, at a grand scale, it still seems important to preserve this sense of agency and to continue to exercise it. We must act without any guarantee of what will come.
This is how I am choosing to practice in these times.
And I ask you: how are you going to preserve your sense of agency in these times, when it's so easy to feel like you're being swept along with the current or about to be smashed by an incoming tidal wave? Pick a single practice you can adopt this week. You could focus on acting on your values in the world (like picking up trash), reclaiming cognitive space (20 minutes of device-free thinking time), or staying in the present moment (enjoying your coffee while it's hot). The most important thing is that it reflects your values, interests, and desires.
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