Life is not something one can "power over", it is something we participate in.
I say this because a good chunk of the interesting problems in life are not constraints that we can power over with willful motion, nor predict or prepare for. In fact it is so common to see people who are stuck in their attempts of willful assertion over things they can't change but can't also see that fact. Others are lost in expending majority of their resources in preparation for eventualities that probably will never come but are still scary for them. Those are examples to modes of loss of agency due to misapplication of power.
In contrast to power, agency also necessitates finessing your way through obstacles and uncertainties when appropriate, in addition to having influence over your environment and conditions.
A mini version of this can be found in an analogy of boxing; punching can't be the only thing in your repertoire, you also need footwork, evasion, blocking. It requires synchrony with your opponent, you constantly adapting to it and influencing it. You can't "power" your way to victory, you have to do all of those things in appropriate configuration to get a chance at it, and even then you might not win.
> You don't need substantial material wealth to have complete agency, but you will if you choose to enjoy the fruits of the modern world and raise a family.
There are two potential problems with this.
Firstly, rationally speaking one would has to sacrifice time for the exact amount of wealth they will require for these goals, and not a dime more, because overworking would just be another way of losing your agency. Not only this equilibrium point is hard to predict, most people are already stuck in wanting the more of it than calculating an approximation of the enough of it.
The second problem is, material wealth is by far not the only input to raising a happy, good family. What kind of a person you need to become to be a good enough parent, is a much more difficult proposition than how much money you need to have to send them to what college. This is again prone to mistakes in trying to satisfy our being needs wit having things. And this inevitably causes losses in agency; as evidenced with many families that had it "all" and still came apart.
“This is again prone to mistakes in trying to satisfy our being needs wit having things.”
The most thought-provoking thing I’ve read in a while. Admittedly it’s a restatement of a fairly common idea (creating a material want from some other want or need) but I’ve never seen it phrased like this.
In particular, it reminded me of times I’ve bought books about some shiny new tech and only read a few pages. In hindsight, maybe it was mostly about the kind of dev I’d like to become.
Life is not something one can "power over", it is something we participate in.
I say this because a good chunk of the interesting problems in life are not constraints that we can power over with willful motion, nor predict or prepare for. In fact it is so common to see people who are stuck in their attempts of willful assertion over things they can't change but can't also see that fact. Others are lost in expending majority of their resources in preparation for eventualities that probably will never come but are still scary for them. Those are examples to modes of loss of agency due to misapplication of power.
In contrast to power, agency also necessitates finessing your way through obstacles and uncertainties when appropriate, in addition to having influence over your environment and conditions.
A mini version of this can be found in an analogy of boxing; punching can't be the only thing in your repertoire, you also need footwork, evasion, blocking. It requires synchrony with your opponent, you constantly adapting to it and influencing it. You can't "power" your way to victory, you have to do all of those things in appropriate configuration to get a chance at it, and even then you might not win.
> You don't need substantial material wealth to have complete agency, but you will if you choose to enjoy the fruits of the modern world and raise a family.
There are two potential problems with this.
Firstly, rationally speaking one would has to sacrifice time for the exact amount of wealth they will require for these goals, and not a dime more, because overworking would just be another way of losing your agency. Not only this equilibrium point is hard to predict, most people are already stuck in wanting the more of it than calculating an approximation of the enough of it.
The second problem is, material wealth is by far not the only input to raising a happy, good family. What kind of a person you need to become to be a good enough parent, is a much more difficult proposition than how much money you need to have to send them to what college. This is again prone to mistakes in trying to satisfy our being needs wit having things. And this inevitably causes losses in agency; as evidenced with many families that had it "all" and still came apart.