Comment by abhaynayar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abhaynayar | Hacker News Reader

I have some qualm with "agency is important" type thinking because when I was in a good situation in life with "moderate" difficulty which I overcame I called it me being agentic. However, when I was in situations in life which were bad and totally out of my control and to the best of my ability I couldn't come out of them, I realized it's pretty much all just luck and circumstance.

Just because you're not emotionally ready to do something doesn't mean you're not trying enough. I feel like we tend to downplay the role of luck in emotions and mind. Like "of course you could be more confident, agentic, assertive, etc. YOU are not doing enough of that". But if you physiologically or materialistically go through a bad patch with respect to health or resources people "get it". If you are not physically gifted to play a certain sport people "get it". But if you're not mentally gifted to be "agentic" it's YOUR responsibility. Don't know why this expectation was set. Same way how mental health has been a stigma and still somewhat is, but if you have a physiological disease it's OK, not your fault.

We all just write advice looking backwards. People who are lucky enough to have the perfect combination of circumstance and mindset to think that agency is all you need write that way.

> However, when I was in situations in life which were bad and totally out of my control and to the best of my ability I couldn't come out of them, I realized it's pretty much all just luck and circumstance.

The failure mode is when someone starts seeing almost everything as totally out of their control, even when it’s not.

When I was doing volunteer mentoring it was a common scenario for people to request help for their hopeless situation at work, then to resolve it through the simplest suggestions like “Have you tried talking to them?” Gentle questions like “What did they say when you asked them about it?” would reveal that most of the hopeless situations were only assumed to be hopeless or out of their control.

That’s not to say that every situation is in your control. However I’ve talked to enough people who erroneously underestimate their agency or control over situations to always question it on a situation by situation basis.

Some times it takes external encouragement to realize that a situation is not actually out of control or hopeless.

> Just because you're not emotionally ready to do something doesn't mean you're not trying enough

The author specifically addressed this.

> My approach [...] was the only one that seemed available given my spiritual and psychological resources at the time. But my orientation to the problem became fixed in time at that point of low agency, and it never occurred to me to revisit it as my capacity for action increased.

They acknowledged that one's capacity to Actually Try is sometimes limited. The article is about getting stuck in that mindset and assuming you're still limited, even when you do later have the emotional resources to bear against the problem.

Putting your comment into simpler terms reveals the nature of your thinking:

When you were doing good you were sure it was your fault, but when you were doing bad you were sure that it was not your fault.

Do you see how that sounds?

Reminds me of this guy https://www.reddit.com/r/homeless/comments/1c9vs22/millionai...

Millionaire who believed he could go from homeless to $1m again in 12 months as an experiment (with advantages) with something more or less like agency alone.

There are agentic ways to submit to the journey even if it’s going to suck for a while and there’s no apparent end in sight. Gratitude. God. Whatever. Lots of people submit by withering away and letting their emotions take them down a path of steady erosion. That is not high agency.

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