I finished my final exams some weeks ago, and right after, I embarked on one of my biggest reporting projects, and then I put in a quit notice for a youth body I always wanted to work for, and now I am here writing a Medium despite tons of high-priority tasks in my to-do list. It is the weekend, after all, and you are young until Monday.
I was listening to Ismatu’s podcast episode about retaining philosophical and directional agency (even/especially?) in your professional life and found myself having a couple of thoughts about agency. Here are some;
- Agency in this sense is constructive willfulness and your ability to take self-initiative of what concerns you — even if it doesn’t belong to you.
- This means agency =/= ownership (although agency can = accountability). You can exhibit agency working for someone just as you can working for yourself. Your inability to take strong initiative when it’s not your ownership is often a sign of broader commitment problems. I’ve also observed that people who lack agency in other people’s affairs will often struggle with it when handling their own affairs. And are even less likely to have their own initiatives as this requires a high level of agency to have and manage.
- Agency can be gained or lost (as in learned or forgotten) — but more importantly, agency can be channeled.
- Some people innately have more agency than others, often based on the kind of sociopsychological influences they’re exposed to on a day-to-day basis. Being exposed to certain types of people, books, art, life experiences, or being neuro-divergent will often cause more people to have high level of agency without willful effort to do so. Some very few people are also just born with it with – but to consolidate on this as opposed to the fact that most people learn agency as an intentional lifestyle choice, is to ironically ignore how much agency you have on improving your agency.
- Innate/mindlessly learned agency is an inherently wild thing. People with innate agency are more likely to get overtly involved(from both quality and quantity perspectives) in everything and burn out easily.
- Untamed agency is still much better than no agency at all.
- As you might have already thought, we live in a culture that discourages agency because productivity is indexed by uniformity in growth and direction. Education is decided by how many people have university degrees as opposed to other types of education; prosperity is measured by how many people have official salary-paying jobs; and good housing is defined as modern white and black block housing with a two-car garage that doubles as a playfield for the kids (– these metrics are not inherently bad things, btw). There is economic and sociocultural mainstreaming of very few ideas of what growth and prosperity should mean, and a severe reduction of spaces where people can maintain sub/alternative cultures without it getting either mainstreamed, fizzled, or canceled.
- Young people, now more than ever, have to put in a lot of (mental) work to build, retain, and channel their agency because even in the absence of cultural influences, we live in a world that is so exploitative and exhibitionist that you feel innate powerlessness over the trajectory of everything, including/especially your own life. It is not looking like we will figure out climate change before it’s too late, or world peace, insurgency, police brutality, misogyny, racism, or (insert any issue of existential importance that humanity literally needs to figure out right fucking now). The reason for this is there are conscious systems built not only to ensure that these states remain but to ensure that you do not think that they can be overturned. See note 7 again.
- The best and most needed form of growth requires a lot of agency. The saying goes that growth means different things to different people — the irony is that for this statement to be true, people need to have the agency to decide what growth should look like for them rather than what is popular. For example, it takes a shit ton of agency for a child who grew up in a non-educated family to vehemently decide to get an education rather than learn a trade just as much as it takes for a child who grew up in an academic family to decide on learning a trade and starting a business rather than getting a post/grad degree. Meaningful, personally fulfilling growth means having the agency to recognize and chase what your own growth should be. At a societal level, the existence of exploitative and self-perpetuating systems also means that more than ever, we need people who have the agency to not only recognize the abuse these systems perpetrate but also ideate and work towards the implementation of better systems.
- It is ridiculously easy to lose agency, a little hard to learn, but almost impossible to channel. The easy-to-hard scale here refers to the amount of time and willful effort it takes to do it. Agency can be passively learned just as it can be lost. In fact, Agency is best learned passively. The people I know with the most agency surround themselves with people, systems, and consumption that are agentic and passively improve their own agency as a result of the experiences they’re exposed to.
- The bulk of work, and what I observe as what separates even people who have agency from each other is how they channel it. Most people do not have agency, but even among people with agency, most people do not channel their agency. Often due to a lack of models, people with agency will unabashedly choose the most agentic decisions; like threading a freelance career rather than working for a large firm; or starting half-baked practice rather than spending lots of time learning theories. A smaller amount of agentic people, however, know how and when to use their agency, and the amount of agency needed for each situation. These are people I have observed keep their day jobs while building or getting a post-grad degree in an attempt to switch career parts or work in finance while trying to build creative products. One of my favorite examples is Fu’ad Lawal, one of Nigeria’s best storytellers who has helped build successful products in media and business, and now building multiple lines of products of himself.
- Be obsessed with your agency. Use it, abuse it, stretch it, waste it even. The only way to realize the depth of what you’re truly capable of doing is by using and analyzing the results of exhibiting your agency.
That is all, for now. I might add more over time. As usual, this is me trying to write my thoughts about what my self-development looks like into the void and hoping that someone somewhere finds meaning in it. I’m open to hearing your own thoughts.
In Ismatu’s words; “may the work of your day passes through your hand with ease.”
PS: This piece was first published on my Medium.
