Thoughts on agency

Gustav Klimt, Beech Grove I, 1902

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The art gallery where I work is an old warehouse from 1875. We have eight large exhibition halls. For the last four weeks, I’ve been busy  in five of those rooms, building walls, and painting, and putting up new exhibitions. When juggling transports and nervous artists, I find it hard to concentrate at the level I need to write properly. Carrying a vase, I overhear the artists talk about a residency in a monastery in southern Italy, where the personnel would cook for them so they could lose themselves in their art, and I feel a tinge of envy and longing.

But there is also something to be said about losing yourself in manual labor. As I climb stairs and paint, as I vacate myself to serve others, I have a sense of zooming out from the daily work of writing. I glimpse the horizon I’m moving toward.

I think it is time for me to do something more ambitious, though I’m not sure what the shape of that is yet. A long essay cycle? A book?

Maud turned seven two weeks ago. It is an interesting age. The first sparks of her grown up self have started to flare up. She has always liked to be around when Johanna and I work and talk about ideas and projects; but until recently, she did so as an anthropologist peering in from the side. Now she’s starting to express with her tone and her body language that she belongs. She is one of us. She belongs with these serious considerations—not all of the time, she still likes to play. But her adult self has begun the long process of pulling itself out. And it is important to her that she is not a kid in the same way her little sister is.

Because of this sudden growing up, one thing that I mull over as I work in the gallery is this: I should sort out my thoughts about agency and introspection, about how to unfold a life that feels true to you—so I can explain it to Maud. I wish I had a great book that I could put in her hand when she turns 14, and it helps her learn what many never learn, or learn to late, namely, that the possibilities are much bigger than you think, that you can live more deeply, and truly, and that you can solve almost any problem if you put your mind to it. A book about how to handle being sentenced to freedom, and to handle it effectively, and authentically, and responsibly. Which would it be? I can’t think of a book like that. Maybe I should write it.

If I wrote a book (or essay cycle) like that, it would sort under the label “how to be agentic.” This is a popular topic in my circles, which I find refreshing, even if I have the feeling that many people in my milieu use the word agency in a slightly different way than I do. There was, for instance, a popular blog post by Cate Hall recently. I agree with all object level advice in that post (everything is learnable, seek out rejection, embrace being low status, and so on), but the framings she used to me felt off color.

Throughout the essay, agency is described in competitive terms. It is about “finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t[.]” The reason to embrace being low status is that it is a “moat”—in other words, something that keeps the competition off your back.

And yes, being able to outcompete others often requires agency. But competition is only a subset of agency, and not, in my experience, the most common or interesting one. Agency, more broadly understood, is about having (or requires) an accurate map of your interiority and a map of the external world, so you can navigate to situations where they overlap in generative ways. Sometimes, you need to compete with others to get there—but so far in my life, that has never happened to me. Or to be precise: I have sometimes ended up in competitive situations, but those have tended to pull me away from myself, making me care more about winning than achieving what I most deeply value, and that is unagentic.¹ To me, agency has been more of a man vs reality story than man vs man.

Defined like this, agency and introspection are closely entwined—they are the external and internal version of the same thing. A kind of perceptiveness. A capacity to see what is going on, accept it, and chart an effective path in the most interesting direction.

I think that talking about agency and introspection separately is misguided. People who emphasize how to get things done, and move faster, and reach higher levels of mastery—agency without introspection—tend to get pulled into fierce yet boring status competitions. People who emphasize introspection and emotions but without a problem solving mentality tend to get stuck, and painfully aware of being stuck. The right balance seems to some version of introspection by doing.

To get my head around these ideas, I have, in the evenings after I get home from the art gallery, been reading Motivation and Personality by Maslow and the Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle (two classics on how to unfold a good life through agency and introspection). I suspect it will take me a few more months to work my way through the secondary literature and properly unpack Aristotle. But I will likely return to this theme to flesh out my thoughts.

On Sunday, we open the new exhibitions at the gallery which means—I hope—that I will get a chance to sit down to write properly again soon. And the garden is giving more strawberries than we can eat. I have a feeling it will be a good summer.

Warmly,
Henrik

1. Why unagentic? If I ask ChatGPT to define what it means to be agentic, it says, an agentic person “acts with intention, initiative, and control, making decisions and taking actions that shape their own life and environment. Being agentic means being self-directed, proactive, and capable of influencing one's circumstances rather than being passive or reactive.” So if you are reactive, allowing incentives or status competitions or corporate decision chains etc to do your goal setting (without you deeply consenting to the decisions after deliberation) you have compromised your capacity to pick your aim, which is central to agency.