I wanted to write and read and make music and dance and exercise and go on walks and and and… Yet, every evening, I was finding myself in the familiar situation of not having done any of what I wanted to do…

A few months ago, I found myself writing in my journal that I finally felt healthy and like myself again. I noticed that after 18 months of slow, up-and-down recovery from Long Covid/burnout/whatever-that-was, I have been feeling good more consistently.

With the returned energy, the desire to do things came back too. But for some reason, I wasn’t doing them. (You know how the saying goes: “If they wanted to, they would”. Well, clearly not.)

Sure, I would usually take care of what I had to do, but none of what I wanted to do. In recovery, that was OK; but now I knew it was not a matter of energy anymore.

Over and over again, I got swept up by the current of the day, feeling like I couldn’t stop to take the time, constantly reacting to what was going on. Honestly, I felt trapped. I felt like I had no control over my life and myself.

At the same time, it seemed like the internet-town got its new obsession in the form of agency. (Most of what I read online about “being high agency” did not really appeal to me – it usually went along with things like being assertive, disruptive/innovative, confident, hustling to climb the corporate ladder or found a multi-million dollar startup. But that’s not all there is.)

Anyway, I couldn’t help but see that the word “agency” seemed to describe just what I was lacking.

And so, without actually deciding to do that, I set out on a journey to discover what agency actually meant for me, and how to find it.

The many faces of agency

What even is agency? In its simplest definition, agency is the capacity to act. I would also add that it’s the capacity to act in a meaningful way aligned with our goals and values.

Simply put, it’s about knowing what you want and going after it (which is roughly how Henrik Karlsson defined agency in his wonderful essay on it https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/agency). (He also says that agency means believing problems are solvable, which, yes, a hundred times yes, but I will get to that later.)

Kourosh Dini in his book Workflow Mastery (https://www.kouroshdini.com/course-books/), which predates the agency hype by a decade, talks about agency a lot. He calls it the ability to act non-reactively. I like that description a lot – it gives me something to work with, something very tangible that I can observe and evaluate in my day-to-day life.

A much less straightforward, but all-the-more illuminating definition that I really like comes from Cate Hall (https://www.ted.com/talks/cate_hall_a_practical_guide_to_taking_control_of_your_life); she called agency “the ability to see the hidden doors in the walls of life”. Now that is something, isn’t it? But how on earth do you do that?

Starting at a low point that I was at, I found that I had to start with the basics. Later, I would name this for myself: microagency.

Microagency: Getting yourself to do what you decided to do

I was starting every day with a list of things I wished to fit into the day. I made them as doable as possible: 10 minutes of meditation, at least one minute of working on my novel, getting to bed before 22:30, move a little bit every day, try to have some fun. I mean, I wasn’t asking for much – the time and energy investment here was absolutely minimal. And yet, I was doing none of it.

I was switching between bouts of frantic activity and sticky procrastination. Sometimes mostly-useful activity, other times mostly-useless activity in the form of “procrastination by organisation” (things like inbox zero, fancy note-taking systems, tidying up the kids room (again)), and often the fake-rest kind of procrastination (on my phone). Fuelled by anxiety, guilt, perfectionism, deep weariness, and an urgent desire to remove tasks from my to-do list.

All the while wondering how it was possible that I didn’t find time for any of what I wanted to do. I was blaming everything from my jobs, to the messy apartment, to all of modern life, and, most of all, myself. Not that that would help.

Where was I losing my agency?

I felt like I had no time and no energy. I was constantly reacting, constantly feeling behind, constantly tired.

But time wasn’t really the problem – as suggested by the 4-5 hours of screen-time I had on my phone daily. Energy wasn’t the problem either. It wasn’t physical energy I was missing, it was emotional energy. I was just feeling overwhelmed.

Agency needs energy. It’s an active stance we take towards the world, holding our ground in the stream of everyday life. And agency needs time. We need to have the time to stop and think, to step aside and decide what to do.

If you truly lack these two resources in your life, acting with agency is very difficult, if not impossible. But I wasn’t lacking them, not really, not in the way I did before while I was sick. I was just not in control of them. They were slipping through my fingers while I was frantically reacting to the demands of life and my own emotions.

It might sound dramatic, recapping it like this now, but it wasn’t. It probably looked like nothing from the outside and felt just like a thin fog of misery and overwhelm on the inside. But it was clouding everything.

I had to find the leak. Where were my time and energy disappearing? Or rather, where was my control over my time and energy disappearing?

Attention as the answer to agency

It wasn’t about an elaborate morning routine, nor some productivity hack. As it usually is, it was a shift in stance. This time, it was about attention.

I wish I could point to a moment when I figured it out, an epiphany, but the truth is it got better gradually. I threw a bunch of things at the problem, saw what stuck, and iterated.

I eventually noticed that the less time I spent on my phone, the better I felt. Ha! What old news, right? But there is a difference between knowing and knowing. You can hear or read something a hundred times, but it’s a completely different thing to know it in your bones. To see the far-reaching consequences in your own life.

And so the question arose: How the hell was the stupid phone stealing my agency?

I guess it’s the same way it steals everything else: attention.

We live in the age of attention economy. There are thousands of stimuli fighting dirty every day trying to grab our attention. But we don’t just give them our eyeballs; they get our time, our energy, we waste emotions and dopamine on them. All precious resources that agency requires.

I would even go further than that.

Attention is agency.

And it’s not just about the phone. It’s not even only about what we attend to; it’s also the how.

There are two kinds of attention: endogenous and exogenous. Exogenous is when something “catches” our attention, like the way your average dad finds himself standing in the doorway watching a two-hour movie he was not intending to watch. Endogenous attention is when you decide to attend to something; when you direct your focus by your own will. Videos and audiobooks mostly engage exogenous attention; reading a “normal” book needs endogenous.

It is very, very difficult to maintain endogenous attention when we are being distracted – when something is catching our exogenous attention. That’s because, from an evolutionary point of view, it’s very important to give attention to things that move or make sounds in our environment. Exogenous attention takes precedence.

Plus exogenous attention is easier. It’s passive, while attending consciously to something you decide on requires active participation. An audiobook or a podcast will continue whether you pay attention or not, but a paper book will not read itself while you zone out.

Having our attention constantly hijacked by things we didn’t actually choose to attend to steals our time, energy, and clarity.

Time, because every distraction takes time, and it takes even longer to get our attention back to what we were attending to at first. Energy, because once we get used to exogenous attention, endogenous one becomes more difficult; because we use up our dopamine on “fun” and meaningful work stops feeling satisfying; because we go through a storm of emotions when we scroll from one unrelated piece of “content” to the next, and are left feeling emotionally exhausted. And clarity, because we are exposed to a deluge of information and stimuli and never get the time to process them.

Most worthwhile things that we can do with our lives, most things that make us feel like we have accomplished something, those need endogenous attention. And so, attention is the basis of how we interact with the world, and how we control our actions in it. Attention is agency.

Macroagency: Choosing the right thing to do

I think of macroagency as the next step over microagency. Now that I feel in control of my day-to-day life and myself, now that I am actually able to do what I plan to do, it’s time to make sure I choose the right things to do.

To do that, I need to know what I want, and to be able to see the hidden doors in the walls of life.

Knowing what one wants sounds pretty straightforward, but it not always is. It is easy to mistake other people’s wants and expectations for our own. It’s easy to believe we should want what other people want for us, or what other people want for themselves. It’s easy to think we should want to be and do what others need from us. It’s easy to think we should want to be who we used to be, or who we used to think we should be.

Thankfully, this point gets addressed by the attention that I talked about before. If you manage to take your attention back from everything that tries to steal it, if you give yourself enough idle, boring, empty time to spend with yourself, you get to know yourself much, much better.

But it’s even easier to let fear of rejection, criticism, or just plain old not fitting in to stop us from wanting what we truly want, and that’s a different problem.

Seeing the hidden doors in the walls of life, on the other hand, sounds like alchemy. How do you even do that? How do you notice opportunities that are not immediately apparent? How do you see the paths that nobody has walked before? And – how do you find the courage to take them?

While I feel like I have managed to increase my microagency over the last months, I find macroagency to be more nebulous and mysterious. I can’t claim I have it. Thinking back on my life, judging by the reactions of others, I guess I have exhibited it a few times, but I never felt particularly “agentic” myself, and I know I sorely lack it in some areas of my life.

So, I guess, take it with a grain of salt, but I feel like I found one of the stronger roots of agency. It’s trust.

Trust as the answer to agency

If you look deep enough, there is trust below all of what you need to have agency.

To know what you want, what you really, truly want, you need to trust yourself. You need to trust that it’s OK to be who you are. You need to trust that you are allowed to be yourself, authentically.

To be able to do what you decide to do in your daily life, you need to trust in your own ability to act. You need to trust in yourself, your capabilities, your ability to steer your attention, to sit with difficult things, to not give up.

To choose away distractions, you need to trust that you can handle boredom, that you know enough, that you won’t miss anything important.

You also need to trust your future selves to do what needs to be done, to make good decisions, without being coerced by the present you’s over-optimisation plans.

To see the hidden doors in the walls of life, you have to trust that they are there.

You have to trust the world that it will give you opportunities. You have to trust that there are always options; good options, ones that solve your problems without sacrificing things you are unwilling to sacrifice. You have to trust that you deserve these opportunities. You have to trust that it’s OK for you to take them, even if they are unorthodox, even if you don’t know anyone who has done it.

And the way you build trust is by action. You do the small things over and over again, and prove to yourself that it works. Prove to yourself that you can trust yourself and trust the world.

In the end, agency is about meaning. It’s about doing what matters to you, in a way that works for you. It’s about choosing yourself. It’s about attending to the world in a way that only you can, and trusting that it’s your birthright.

Agency is attention. And trust.