Just Do It
This is such a tired, cliched phrase, isn’t it? And cultures are full of it. American culture—perhaps particularly in Silicon Valley and similar environments—is definitely way over-full of it. Grind, hustle, work your ass off, do what you gotta do. It’s tiring, honestly.
I define broad agency (or agenticity) as having a few facets. The first facet is narrow agency: the drive and willingness to be self-directed in putting oneself out there and driving towards achieving one’s innermost aims. The second facet is conscientiousness, which itself breaks down into two sub-facets: industriousness and orderliness. Industriousness is defined roughly as how hard someone works, while in this case orderliness is defined as how cleanly a person directs their efforts. I don’t actually think that narrow agency and conscientiousness are particularly related to one another. So someone could be a naturally very hard worker and well-organised, but just not really work in a self-directed way towards their innermost aims (the worker bee). Conversely, someone could be great at self-directionally putting themselves out there and driving towards whatever fuzzy and transient aims they have, but not really work that hard or be that precise with their goals (the grifter).
I say all this because I want to focus on narrow agency. Becoming more conscientious is great (and that’s something I want to do as well) but I feel like we’re pretty good at building habits to work harder and to be more organised. Society seems to kind of reward that. But narrow agency feels more difficult.
I was raised in a fairly remote (not quite rural) suburb where you couldn’t go anywhere—not to school, not to a friend’s house, not to the supermarket—without driving. For my whole life, I was told what to do. I went to elementary school, and then to middle school, and then to high school, and then to college. In all these institutions, the structure of work was that one did exactly as one was instructed to the letter in a highly controlled and structured environment. I did the activities my parents wanted me to do and went where they wanted me to go, and was home under their supervision the rest of the time. This may sound quite oppressive, but I didn’t see it that way. That was just how life worked. People told you what to do and what rules to follow, and you did those things and followed those rules, and things worked out.
It didn’t help that I am not naturally a behaviorally active person. I was born nine days late, not because of complications, but because I simply refused to move until I was forced to. I didn’t really want to do activities as a kid, and I can’t recall asking my parents to put me in more activities than they did. I didn’t have that many friends, either, and I didn’t make the strongest efforts to hang out with even the closest of them. And maybe because my life was so structured, I associated “work” with this kind of rigid structure, and “play” with agency.
To top it all off, I instilled myself with a strong skepticism against hustle culture like messages. I never saw the point of the business and entrepreneurship podcasts my mom listened to, nor the point of my classmates taking all AP classes and getting 4.0 grades while running three clubs. Because what was that work for? To get into a better college? To earn more money? And then what after that? To buy a bigger tombstone? It was manifestly not worth it to make oneself that miserable for that foolish absurdity, and I feel both pity and irritation for those who are slaves to it.
But everything changed when the real world attacked. I went to the graduation ceremony, we threw our hats in the air, and then… nothing. There was no next step. No teacher telling me what to do. No assignment with a clear rubric that I could just get an A on. No test that I could quizlet my way through. I often say that it was as if my whole life I’d been taught how to swim in theory in a classroom, and that graduation was like getting thrown into the deep end. I was expected to just know how to backstroke by virtue of having been taught fluid dynamics in Physics 201.
But what does my privileged sob story have to do with agency? Right. So I was unaccustomed to just doing projects and taking actions that I thought were worth it. For example, I wanted to do some kind of writing, and people had given me good feedback on my writing before. But I didn’t start this substack until quite recently because… no one told me to? No one told me how substack worked? It just felt kind of scary and weird to put my stuff out there to be judged by others and I felt like I needed someone to tell me to do it anyway? But now I’m doing it, and I quite like doing it, and it seems like a few people like that I do it. That wasn’t so hard, so why didn’t I do it earlier? Why is it so hard for (most of us) to be agentic? I think there are at least a few major reasons.
There’s not really a place in most childhood environments (like school) to practice agency. The kids who are agentic are probably labeled ADHD or troublesome or whatever or otherwise punished. Even opportunities to choose the topic and direction of one’s own project are quite limited through high school and college. Imagine a class where the teacher never assigns you homework and expects you to come up with your own assignments and only then grades them (kids who don’t come up with assignments automatically fail). Imagine that you’re not only graded on the competency you demonstrate but also on your initiative and the ingenuity/utility of the questions you ask yourself. That sort of class doesn’t exist, but maybe it should, because it would go a long way towards preparing kids for the real world. My point is that we’re pretty much universally—if to varying degrees—taught to be deferent followers for the first ~20 years of our lives. So we’ve been instilled with deep habits to defer to authority and to not forge our own paths.
Agency is also pretty scary, or at least it should be in many cases. The vast majority of us have some irrational fear of social embarrassment, and failure has the tendency to invite criticism and/or mockery. Beyond this irrational concern, though, the consequences of failure can be very real. Personally, one might lose money, resources, respect of important others, and time. In terms of altruism, one might lose out on opportunities to improve the world, or might (inadvertently) make things worse. Even if one is quite careful regarding these things, I don’t think the risk can ever be completely mitigated.
Agency also requires a lot more psychological effort than deference does. If someone tells you to do something, at least you have some kind of reference, some kind of compass of “this is in the right direction”. You also have the excuse of “I was just following orders” to fall back on. Being agentic doesn’t really allow for either of those things. You have to look out into the world and find the direction you want to take. You have to be the one who makes the decisions about what to do and what not to do. And you have to take greater responsibility for the consequences of your actions. That’s not really an easy burden to bear. Doing things that my parents don’t approve of has been surprisingly difficult at 23 years old, and not just because I rely on them for funding.
Personally, I find agency quite paralysing at times. There are flashes here and there of what I could be, of how excited I might feel about my life if I weren’t so caught-up in worry or depression, but I still struggle a lot of the time. I often worry that I don’t like the work I’m doing, or that the work I’m doing isn’t going anywhere, or that people won’t approve of the work I’m doing, or that I’ll look back at the work I’m doing and regret doing it. I’m hopeful that a lot of this is just that I’m isolated and don’t have job security. But I have a sneaking suspicion that not all of it can be attributed to that. That this agency thing is something I’ll have to figure out without life figuring it out for me.
I have no idea what I’m doing, and I kind of subscribe to the idea that to some degree, no one knows what they’re doing. At least, far fewer people know what they’re doing than it seems. I hate not knowing what I’m doing. I find this exploration of the world, tussling with the uncertainty and unfairness of it all, to be draining. And I still don’t think I’m all that great at being agentic. So when I figure it all out, I’ll be sure to let you all know. Until then, keep on trying, keep on doing, you can do it. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.