Agency IS a virtue, actually

The hardest part of “just doing things” is HAVING THINGS YOU WANT TO DO.

“High agency” has been getting a lot of flack lately.

In an April New York Times op-ed titled “All the worst people seem to want to be ‘high agency,’” Sophie Haigney criticized the valorization of agency in and around Silicon Valley as “emblematic of a moment when risk-taking is overvalued.” Dictators and amoral scoundrels often have the least compunction about “just doing things” and “acting without permission,” she observed, referencing some of the most popular “high agency” aphorisms. Noting the irony that we now also use the term “agents” to refer to AI bots (which can also “just do things,” often better and faster than we can), she warned of a future where we’re reduced to “constant hamster wheels of action, unmoored from any values, no compass to be found.”

In May, NPR had Haigney on for a segment titled “Free will and the cult of ‘high agency’”. An article in The Nation blamed “the tech sector’s worship of ‘high agency’” for a healthcare startup’s allegedly unscrupulous marketing practices.

As you might guess, I disagree with these critiques. I think they rest on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and scope of human agency, which is first and foremost about forming and being motivated by values.

Unfortunately, those on the “high agency” side haven’t been able to offer much of a rebuttal, because they mostly share the same misunderstanding.

For instance, one of tech’s own thought leaders, Shreyas Doshi, recently wrote on X that while he is “a huge fan of High Agency,” he has come to realize that 1) “Not everyone can develop High Agency—and High Agency people will find it hard to accept this”, and 2) “It has major professional upsides, but also creates chronic anxiety in life situations you can’t control.” By implication, such value-judgments as whether to pour one’s energy into fretting about situations one can’t control lie beyond the scope of High Agency.

The one prominent agency advocate who directly responded to Haigney’s anti-agency screed was Cate Hall, in a post titled Agency is for sociopaths (but it doesn’t have to be). Conceding the basic premise that agency is a “morally neutral tool,” Cate argues that the well-intentioned could do with more of it—whereas the ill-intentioned don’t respond to persuasion anyway. Responding to Haigney’s claim that “to valorize agency without also emphasizing its purpose allows us to ignore harder questions like How do I live a good life? And what about the collective good?”, Cate writes:

“I’m sorry, but the average New York Times reader is not primarily lacking in concern about the collective good. If you ask any educated liberal about all the problems they might theoretically devote themselves to, you’ll find dozens. What you’ll find less of is a willingness to actually take action in ways that aren’t completely standard and completely ineffective, like retweeting a meme or donating to an incompetent non-profit.”

This is where I radically differ from Cate¹: the primary reason most “well-intentioned” people lack such willingness is because their intentions are standard and ineffective to begin with. No doubt they can name dozens of vague, generic causes that sound “good” to their particular “collective”; but what personal connection do they have to these causes? How specifically do they see these problems affecting their lives or the lives of those they care about, and what would they value about living in a world where these problems are solved? Is the work involved in solving these problems a good fit for their particular interests and talents, such that it would be a meaningful and rewarding use of their time relative to other goals they could pour their energy into pursuing?

The hardest part of “just doing things” is having things you want to do. Figuring out what you want, and integrating your wants so that they amplify rather than inhibit one another, is essential to the kind of decisive action we associate with High Agency. But having clarity on what you want is not something that just happens to you, at least not for long; it is something you need to build and maintain using your agency. And this includes actively and honestly reflecting on your ideas of what is right and good, lest these ideas end up guilting and inhibiting you more than they guide and inspire you.

Just doing things, permissionlessness, seeing the world as malleable and oneself as capable—these are the “doing” parts of agency, agency’s large muscle groups.

But the beating heart of agency is moral gumption: the courage, creativity, and self-trust to conceive of paths you want to pursue; of values that move you; of dents you yearn to make in the universe; of a life you deeply desire. These are the “wanting” parts of agency, which give the “doing” parts direction and steam.

In practice, “doing” and “wanting” are intimately intertwined. You need to do things to gather data on what you like doing, and you need to process that data in honest, skillfully introspective ways to understand what it means about you and how it ought to guide what you do next. Full-stack agency requires the integration of both.

The reason we (rightly) admire people who get things done and don’t wait for permission is because we implicitly recognize them to be doing things they genuinely believe in, things they judge as good and worthwhile by their own lights. Action fueled by such loving clarity of purpose looks nothing like the “action” of a rat on a hamster wheel. The proponents of “high agency” are generally attempting to point people toward the former sort of action, not the latter; but so long as they understand agency as a “morally-neutral” tool, they lack the conceptual vocabulary—and the moral clarity—to guide people toward the former.

Human agency is architecture, not contract work

Contra both sides of the “agency” debate, we have as much agency over the goodness of our ends—our intentions, our values, our conceptions of the “good”—as over the efficacy of our means. Our ultimate task as human agents, after all, is to architect our own lives: that is, the whole latticework of interconnected ends and means to which we want our life to add up. “Should I optimize for impact, or enjoyment, or financial security? Is this even the right question?” “What do I want in a life partner?” “Will my life be better or worse if I have kids?” There are more and less agentic ways to think through such design decisions, and the vast majority of people default to the less agentic ways. That’s why so much of my writing focuses on how to approach your life design agentically (cf. the builder’s mindset and your life as the standard).

The kinds of ends you form when you exercise full-stack agency are morally better than the kinds of ends you passively absorb

By this standard, prioritizing short-term vanity metrics over the ultimately far more rewarding prospect of creating a valuable and trusted business is low agency; it reflects a failure of vision and imagination, a settling for a lame but easily accessible default over the much more fulfilling life one could conceive and execute for oneself.

As to the vengeful dictator who devotes much of his life to dominating over and tearing down anyone who has ever slighted him, he is lower-agency still: having relinquished the pursuit of constructive, personally meaningful goals for his own life, he instead squanders his energy on the destruction of anyone or anything that reminds him of that fact.

A quiet life spent on constructive, personally fulfilling pursuits is higher-agency than either of these “action-packed” lives.

Thus understood, the exercise of full-stack agency is is morally good. It involves assuming responsibility for the whole of one’s life, which calls upon such virtues as honesty, rationality, integrity, courage. Agency is not downstream of these virtues; it is the motive power that builds and applies them.

The #1 way for most people to increase their agency is to learn to take greater ownership of their life design, versus either 1) executing on some prefabricated blueprint of a great life (whether supplied by the ethos of Effective Altruism, or Silicon Valley, or the Bible, or one’s drill-sergeant parents) or 2) haphazardly piling on bricks and girders with no view to the overall design. To this end, they need exercises like the ones I’ve compiled in my life vision and values exploration worksheet (AI-augmented version freely available in the GenaAI coaching app; see also Karel Vuong’s accompanying lifemapping tool), and lived examples like the ones I’ve compiled in the Fantastic Builders and Where to Find Them section of this newsletter.

One of those Fantastic Builders is Henrik Karlsson, whose own writing on agency acknowledges the “wanting” dimension more explicitly than most: in his and his wife Johanna’s lovely essay “On Agency”, they refer to this dimension as “autonomy,” defined as “the capacity to formulate autonomous goals in life—the capacity to dig inside and figure out what wants to happen through you, no matter how strange or wrong it seems to others.” They then give various examples and tactical advice for bolstering this capacity, such as by “un-bundling” the valued aspects of our goals from the parts that came along for the ride. For instance, Henrik describes having previously bundled “having a publisher” and “getting a salary from your writing” with “being a writer.” Realizing he could un-bundle these parts freed him to set different sorts of goals than he had previously conceived of (such as “develop my own voice as an essayist”).

Another is mathematician and climber John Gill, who developed an entirely new category of sport (bouldering) that better suited his design specifications.

Another is Gumroad founder Sahil Lavigna, who rethought whether “building a billion dollar company” was actually what he wanted for himself, ultimately forming a new, creative conception of “success” better tailored to his personality and life.

Another is serial-founder-turned-full-time-mom Jesse Genet, who consciously imbued each new chapter of her life with the same youthful spirit of adventure and romance that inspired her at age 16 (read the full story).

One of my biggest recommendations for cultivating our own full-stack agency is to expose ourselves to wide-ranging exemplars like the above, whether by observing and interacting with them up-close (which is ideal) or at least learning about them via interviews and biographies. This is also why it’s important to study history and literature: to learn about all the complex and diverse ways that human lives can go, and to extract from that vast knowledge base the wisdom to better architect our own lives. Simply exposing ourselves to such ideas and stories doesn’t automatically tell us what to value, of course; but it arms us with an increasing database of knowledge and action affordances from which to do our own iterative work of judging what might be worthy of our interest and why, and of directing our effort and energy accordingly.

Zooming in on the moment-to-moment design work

Figuring out what you want is not something you only need to do at big decision points, like what to major in or who to marry. If you zoom in on what your mind is doing in the course of any given decision or pursuit, you will notice countless opportunities to exercise agency over your own values and desires, ensuring that they align with the nature of reality, with your own nature and needs, and with each other.

For instance, let’s say you are in the process of interviewing job candidates for your company or team. How do you decide which candidate you want?

Do you remind yourself of the long-term goals and values that led you to start or join this organization to begin with, and then project, as vividly as possible, how a given candidate might serve or detract from this vision over time? (High-agency)

Do you default to some mix of 1) generically familiar or easy-to-assess metrics that will sound impressive to your investors/boss/inner drill sergeants, and/or 2) gut feelings you haven’t examined? (Low-agency)

If, say, you notice that you felt challenged by one candidate and validated by another, what do you do with this signal?

Do you ask yourself what this means and how important it is, given the nature of the role and the team culture you want to promote? Or if you haven’t worked out what kind of team culture you want to promote, do you give some thought to this now? (High-agency)

Or do you reflexively prefer 1) the more validating candidate out of insecurity, or 2) the more challenging candidate out of a fear of looking insecure if you turn them down? (Low-agency)

Even more critically: which of these motivations do you privilege and throw your weight behind? And—this is the key point—how consciously and intentionally do you make this choice?

Depending on the context, exercising our agency over wants doesn’t always take such a deliberative form. Sometimes it takes the form of savoring a long-beloved activity or person, or reminiscing on favorite moments and noticing the feelings that come up, or following our curiosity, or losing ourselves in a riveting conversation and reflecting back on it afterward. But whatever we’re doing, we’re dealing in value-judgments: positively or negatively charged estimates of what things mean to us. The fundamental starting point for human agency lies here: at the value-judgments we actively build, or passively absorb, in the privacy of our minds. Building them takes a great deal more effort, more creativity, more courage, more self-awareness, more honesty—that is to say, more agency. The reward? A fully-lived life of our own design.

Exercising such full-stack agency over one’s life design is decidedly not the default. Most people, having not been exposed to a wide enough range of examples like Henrik’s and Jesse’s and Sahil’s, assume they must select their life design from some small menu of preapproved blueprints, rather than architecting it from first principles.

The current discourse on “high agency” has gotten popular partly because it pushes back on this kind of outsourcing. But it has also, paradoxically, become its own preapproved blueprint, loosely based on the cultural archetype of a Silicon Valley tech founder. “You can just do things.” “Move fast and break things.” “Permissionless action.”

Sometimes it is indeed high-agency to behave in these ways.

Other times it is higher-agency to plan ahead and think things through, or to move slowly and demand perfection, or to consult with experts.

The key question in every case is:

Are you doing what you honestly judge best, by your own lights, given the full context of the fully-lived life you want to build?

If you’re a founder or highly ambitious person interested in individual coaching to bolster your full-stack agency: get in touch or book a first session.

1. Our disagreements notwithstanding, I’ve learned a great deal from Cate’s writing on agency, and I’m excited to read her and Sasha Chapin’s forthcoming book.