High Agency to Do What?

Seeking agency is a local status trap.

John William Waterhouse “Destiny” (1900)

I’ll admit that my pounding heart kept me awake a few nights in 2022. AI could parrot intelligence.

I did not believe that what is most human about humanity was intelligence, but I was afraid I was about to be proven wrong. I held my breath for three years. The thing went right on parroting intelligence, and then… nothing happened.

So, after being in the lion’s den long enough to feel the thing wasn't going to eat us, we said: “OK, so it's not quite intelligence that makes us special, then.

“It must be agency.”

And so, the meme of the “high-agency individual” spread. People write articles making a subtle distinction between intelligence and agency and showing you how you, too, can become high agency. It’s funny that it's also about the time AI companies started making “AI agents.”

The idea, in essence, is the ability to make stuff happen; the sort of preternatural essence of the sort that, when you set your mind to something, it tends to come into being. This is supposed to be our last moat against the rise of the thinking machine.

For me, the question remains: Agency to do what?

We are a creature that imitates. We borrow our desires from each other. On the business end of that fact, people work their entire lives to become “influencers,” in order to infect their own desires in the minds of others, and then sell them the online course to achieve it.

If we're going to start talking about agency, we're going to have to talk about which desires we want to use our agency to bring about. There were plenty of high-agency individuals fighting to keep lead in gasoline.

Destiny is agency’s master. It is your life’s whole kit and caboodle, even the strange parts you don’t really know about. If agency is the ability to do things, destiny is the right thing to do.

To be attuned to your destiny is to be deeply aware of your own circumstances - to be painfully awake in the dense jungle of your sensibilities, limitations, genetics, history, conscience, place, and so on. From there, to make decisions to fulfill the desire born from your impossibly unique situation, no matter how strange, stupid, impractical, or even deadly it seems to all onlookers. With a stronger sense of destiny, you can resist jealous desires from the careerists, hackers, and AI influencers.

There are ways to uncover our destiny. They are subtler and may be more poetic than you might get from a productivity listicle, but they are reliable and useful, still.

The Subtle Orbital Patterns of Destiny

Seven years ago, I was working some marketing job for a fashion company. We had just moved to a fancy new highrise and I was setting up my desk that overlooked downtown LA. Drawing up my nerve, I pulled my boss aside: “I quit.”

The day before, my dad called to let me know he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. It made a flash go off in my brain.

That flash, I think, is a glimpse of a longer timeframe. It’s the wisdom that tells a man on his deathbed, “You should’ve done that thing.” Occasionally glimpsed in youth, mostly ignored.

I knew mine had something to do with thinking and writing, since I had been doing that since I was about eight. To support myself in the meantime, I became a handyman. I drove around LA hanging up TVs for people, listening to books, and writing every night. On my last day at the marketing job, my coworker said, “Wow, you’re so humble.” I still brood on that comment.

After a few months, I got a small following and started making money from clients. I took whatever I could get: I wrote bedtime stories for meditation apps, an interactive play in San Francisco, and ghostwrote a therapy podcast. I eventually found myself doing agency work for startups, making good money again, but always planning to make a big pivot a little bit later. Once again, I convinced myself that if I could solve “The Money Problem” first, then I would be free to build the life that I actually wanted.

Seven years flew by. I was a little wiser, but in the same basic position: I had made a life that rhymed slightly more with my destiny, but it still held me back from the actual thing. The gravity of my life’s destiny had not changed, no matter how hard I tried to avoid its humbling demands. This time, at least, I could triangulate my center of gravity with a lot more certainty. What are the chances that a whim or fantasy would persist for seven years? Several decades? Time is a great indicator of the inevitable. I knew this would be pestering me for my entire life with these cycles of avoiding it and coming back to it.

That is, unless I just went ahead and made myself a servant of my destiny.

The biggest reason I avoided my destiny, actually, is my agency. I’ve always thought of myself as someone with high agency. Out of college, I got a rejection letter for a tech company apprenticeship. So, I called the founder and said, “You should really reconsider.” He hired me on the spot for my “chutzpah.”

Agency is a hammer. It’s fast and forceful, but it tends to break things it can’t measure. Instead of realizing this and trying a different tact, I just tried to increase it. More agency, more willpower, more attack. I listened to a lot of productivity podcasts and the like. I would try to not notice that most of these entrepreneurs and gurus had built their empire by crippling their unconscious. They always seemed to have some hidden addiction, despair, or personality disorder. The ignored shadow of their destiny protested their conscious efforts. I had a sneaking suspicion that this was not the right way.

Then there was this other, mysterious class of people: the Destiny Followers. They always seem slower, more careful about giving out advice. When they do, it would either be paradoxical or so odd it was funny.

I remember this interview with Tolkien, where the interviewer says, “So, you made up entire languages for the Elves before you even started writing The Lord of the Rings?” to which he says, “Oh, yes...” Then after a pause, the interviewer says, “Why?” And Tolkien, looking more disinterested than affronted, gives a tiny shrug.

That tiny shrug is more powerful than hell’s army of agency.

What I should have seen as my guiding light was that flash. I did, for a short time. I think quitting was the right move, and I think working as a handyman was a stroke of genius. But when that bright moment passed, I lost track of the guiding light. I, little by little, allowed myself to be controlled by the fear of running out of gas and that pestering voice of the salesmen telling me to buy more gas tanks “just in case.”

This is how people might waste their entire lives, by their own standards. Only once it’s too late for courage to help, often, do they have the clarity to see this pattern.

Remember what you wanted in moments where the fear of loss of status could not reach you: when confronted with mortality, when you were a kid, or even when you daydream. These aren't data-points you can graph, but more like subtle orbital patterns you can start to get a sense of. It's best perceived in a flash, and not with too much scrutiny. Destiny is fragile and should be protected from the judgement of others (even from yourself) until it is strong enough to be undeniable.

After getting a philosophy degree, Steve Martin worked as a sales clerk for the magic shop at Disneyland. To pass the time, he learned how to do lasso tricks. After years of doing odd, philosophical comedy routines, he was mostly misunderstood and disliked. Then, he was invited on Johnny Carson. After the cameras turned off, Carson leaned over to Steve and offered him a prophecy: “You will use everything you ever learned.” That’s exactly what he did when, years later, he did his lasso routine on the set of The Three Amigos.

Instead of using high agency to assuage our fears while making destiny wait, we can make destiny the guiding light and then use the force of our will to subject ourselves to whatever strange demands it makes. Agency is a great servant, but a terrible master.

While simple, it is so lonely and odd that practically no one does it. No one is incentivized, you have to understand, to put you on your own path. Even your parents aren’t likely to be interested in your destiny, but more in using you as a vehicle to assuage their own fears. This must be forgiven quickly, though, because we all make those mistakes constantly. The only thing to be done is to stop making it now.

I know that we take career predictability as a right granted by God, and so we’re hard-pressed to give that idea up. However, you can follow your destiny from within any career. Werner Herzog worked as a welder in a steel factory to save up for his first camera.

Destiny isn’t a script or an algorithm set for your life. It’s more like a prophecy. It is a paradox of both freedom and constraint. In fact, it is the maximum quality of both of those. You are infinitely in command of your destiny and yet it is written in stone. It cannot be tracked or pursued, it must ensue.

People hope agency will save them as AI flattens intelligence. This assumes a blank slate cosmology - that you can “choose” your desires and circumstances. If you don’t first know about, then believe in, your own destiny, you will just use your agency to amplify your error. Any effort of rebellion is simply the Inversion of your destiny and therefore only confirms its centering gravity.

This is good news, in the end. All the years of your rebellion and being lost has only strengthened your destiny and made it grander, more difficult, but more noble, because there is more raw material which must be synthesized into your final destination.

There is no hack or partial measure that will work. All of you must go, or what you left behind will make you regret it.

It is impossible to measure from the outset, but in hindsight, it will seem as firm and obviously real as a tree trunk.