Common word, agency - it's one I hear every now and then working with startups. But never have I really understood what it means the way I did from reading your essay, Henrik. Thank you.
"agency" is an interesting word these days. Many people are using it to describe many different aspects, or a combination of them. This piece aligns with how i've thought about it, a combination of self-efficacy (knowing what you want), creativity (figuring out how to get it) and drive(doing the work to get it)
“How to handle being sentenced to freedom,” - this hit hard.
I found freedom more than a decade ago after realizing that I've been living in the shackles of someone else's dream or idea of life.
But what have I done since? How have I handled my sentence? How far have I carried it out?
What can I do now, now that I have agency?
Having experienced a childhood trauma, learning firsthand what it means not to have agency and losing my sense of security at a very young age, agency and freedom are sacred to me.
Thanks for exploring this term in depth. I, too, hope to impart some wisdom to my children.
Congrats on breaking free from the shackles! I, too, had an abusive childhood and a toxic dynamic that I faced head on and broke out of in my early 30s. I was cut out of my family. It was the hardest thing I’ve done but the most important thing I’ve done.
Something I’ve been thinking of lately: none of us is agentic in every pocket of life. Parts of our psyche mature on different timelines, so the initiative we show in one aspect can vanish in another.
Someone can look outrageously in charge in area X, then fold like a lawn chair in area Y.
Take Herzog's memoir, where he writes about bolting off to film La Soufrière [before his first divorce]:
“When I spontaneously decided in 1977 to fly to the Caribbean, I stopped at home for a couple of minutes to pick up my passport. There was our little boy, and it was far from clear whether I would return alive. … This is not the sort of behavior that a marriage can tolerate.”
Reading that, I went...huh? How can a man so fiercely agentic in/with making films treat the fallout at home as if it were destiny?
The point is, even the most “put-together” people have blind spots—and vice versa.
You, for example, were more agentic in designing your marriage/romantic life than Herzog was; what you lacked in essay writing then was simply imagination for what was possible (not agency). Herzog shows the opposite imbalance.
I believe that:
- We all have well-lit rooms where we exercise agency.
- And dim corners where we still act like passengers.
Your vaccine-clearing example perfectly illustrates what Ishiguro calls our blindness to possibilities: "if that's all you know, if that's the world you've grown up in, you cannot see the boundaries for which you have to run... You cannot see what you have to rebel against."
Loved it. It's cool that you reshaped the essay around Herzog's life and experiences; it left a strong emotional imprint. Loved this quote:
"The professionals, having too many preconceived ideas about how to go about things, wasted resources and missed the light in the trees."
Your confession that you enjoyed writing essays and thinking on paper but put it off for a long time because you thought you can't make a living that way because there's no essay ecosystem in Sweden made me realize I was doing the exact same thing, in reverse. I feel most alive when I write stories and memoirs. But I was thinking: "There's no way I can make a living in India by writing stories, I need to write non-fiction to establish myself before getting a book deal, or submit stories to magazines first." I was focusing on the form of the solution and not thinking about what function I wanted to solve.
I'm not thinking simple enough, like Herzog did. I could just write stories and post them on my blog here. Instead of wanting to "be" a writer of stories, I can focus on writing "the next story."
P.S. Shoutout to Naomi Kanakia who's doing this already.
Have you written anything about attunement, i.e., what you refer to when you write "They are not attuned enough to figure out what they want and how the world works"? I find your essays (almost) extremely helpful, but a lot of the high-agency work feels like steps 2, 3, etc., after the step 1 of attuning. When I read about someone like Werzog, who felt a deep calling at 14, it's both inspiring and alienating because the idea of feeling a call like that is as foreign to me now, at 32, as it was when I was 14. I'm probably being naive, but I often think I could problem solve the agency steps... if only I could get the attunement step done first!
Same, would love to read about the first step of getting clearer about goals, what problems I will enjoy solving etc. For the highly agentic like Herzog, that almost seems to be a given
I’ll always be in awe of the children, like Herzog, who instinctively understand that the “rules” were made up by people just like us, crafted to serve their own purposes. If our vision differs from theirs, why should we follow the same rules? Understanding this is perhaps the greatest qualifier of a person's future chances at success.
I wish I’d understood this sooner. I admire your commitment to pass this sense of freedom to your daughter early on. Thank you for sharing your journey.
For most people, this takes time to learn. But life is long, so if you get to it at 30, 40, there is still so much time left to do good things. This is something I learned to appreciate when I worked with people in their 80s - you can fit so many lifes into a lifetime.
Thank you for this essay! Love to stay up reading stuff like this. It's also so cool that you posted this on my 20th birthday — I am stepping into a new decade, all confused, and it's very timely for me :)
What I struggle with the most with agency is that I don't always know which of my artistic itches I can really control. Creatives often say that there is almost an external force pulling them toward an idea or a project, and I relate to that a lot. In the beginning of the essay you, too, I think, referred to it as something that 'wants to happen through you'. Because it's something else, not you, not even necessarily a part of your Self, it may be unclear that you can, in fact, learn to control. Furthermore, I have even often thought that it's preferable to let a creative force running through you take charge instead. I do, however, believe that my dream creative pursuits are pursue-able :) It's the taming them that's hard!
TLDR: I disagree that a) problems are solvable, b) knowing what one genuinely cares about and acting upon that is sufficient to actually achieving goals.
Slightly Longer version:
a) Some problems are not solvable. Even if I really care about finding an explicit solution to a three body problem, I can't do that. I can't revive people who died, even if I truly care about them. And many other problems, the space of which is limited mostly by my imagination. No matter how agentic I am.
b) Even if I am agentic according to your definition — i.e. I know my goals in life and I am ready to solve all the problems standing on my way — I still have to calculate what proxy goals I need to achieve in order to start nourishing What I Care About. And I seem to have a finite life (another problem, maybe even solvable to some extent), so each day spent on the proxy goals is a day not spent directly on What I Care About. Even if it is totally in accordance with my supposed agency. (I think your example of Herzog living with his mom until 31 is in line with this? There are indeed tradeoffs.) In an extreme case, I could spend all my life fixing obstacles on my path to the Things I Care About, and never even get there. And being agentic doesn't help. Maybe being too agentic even makes things worse.
A lyrical version:
A) Imagine a man. Throughout his youth he was very agentic and managed to figure out that He Cares About his family and, for example, engineering: he loves constructing new awesome things. He already has personal achievements in both areas of his interest, and is looking forward to achieving even more, and, thanks to his agency skills, he knows how to do that.
And then in his mid twenties a war comes. He is conscripted. Some time later, he dies on a battlefield. It turns out, he can't achieve his life goals and pursue what he cares about if he's dead. And he can't solve this problem either. "So maybe not all problems are solvable", he concludes before his last breath.
---
Maybe he was not agentic enough? He definitely checks on the first parts of the agency definition, but maybe he failed to detect the problem in advance or see the reality of the problem? Let's give him another chance. This time let's assume that problems are indeed solvable.
B) Imagine a man. Throughout his youth he was very agentic and managed to figure out that He Cares About his family and, for example, engineering: he loves constructing new awesome things. But, he knows that hard times are ahead. So he decides to put his immediate interests aside for a sec and solve this global problem first to even have an opportunity to solve the actual problems He Cares About later.
Instead of spending his time on engineering, he spends his time on figuring out how to save his world from the upcoming war — maybe he tries to gain political power, maybe he becomes a spy, maybe something else. Since all problems are solvable, in his early twenties he successfully prevents the conflict from happening, his family from experiencing the horrors of war and his own future from ending.
But now he has spent years not enjoying/studying/practicing What He Cares About. So he starts from zero. Additionally, there are other problems in the world that threaten his ability to do engineering, or problems that threaten his family. So again he goes and very agentically solves e.g. climate change. And then something else. Then something else entirely.
He never got to design buildings or bridges or other things he knew he would have liked to work on. "So maybe I should've solved the immortality first" he concludes before his last breath.
---
This time he was strategically solving problems before they could even become dangerous to his goals. And the problems all turned out to be solvable. Except for not having infinite amount of time, of course. If only he could figure out how to manipulate time...
C) Imagine a man. Throughout his youth he was very agentic and managed to figure out That He Cares about his family and, for example, engineering: he loves constructing new awesome things.
Before his country went to war, he did what he could to construct a time machine.
He succeeded, used it to go back to a lot of times and places, destroy all the seeds of the world problems that would prevent him form having a happy family and great engineering achievements, and he finally had to live his infinitely beautiful life. Forever — because he also fixed the heat death of the universe.
That's what didn't happen.
No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't build it -- even though the problem is solvable by assumption, he was too inexperienced and didn't have enough time.
And then in his mid twenties a war comes. He is conscripted. Some time later, he dies on a battlefield. It turns out, he can't achieve his life goals and pursue what he cares about if he's dead. And he can't solve this problem either. "So maybe I should've been doing engineering, like I wanted, and then I would've been happy", he concludes before his last breath.
Thank you for taking the time to write out this story. I liked the effect of the layered endings, how reading it gives you the sense that fixing problems is like trying to squeeze air around a half-empty balloon. I was feeling lonely as I looked through the comments, and now I don’t feel lonely anymore, even though I don’t agree with you, either.
I could quibble that there are other things the would-be engineer could’ve done (e.g. emigrating, arranging an amateur machining injury that would prevent military service, or proactively joining the army corps of engineers, and anyway, trying to build a time machine is already living his dream as an engineer), but none of them would’ve solved the problem of war coming for his family and friends, and finally of death.
I don’t read Henrik’s piece as claiming all problems are solvable, and certainly not that they’re all solvable at the same time. But I remember when my mom was dying, how keenly I felt that what I wanted most was to keep her healthy and alive, and it wasn’t something I could do. It made me resent people whose problems were more solvable, and especially the way they built their worldviews around problems’ solvability. That was sixteen years ago, and looking back, I actually did approach my mom’s death with a fair amount of agency: doing what could be done, recording memories, staying present with it instead of running away, and ultimately letting it change me. I’d rather live like a crème brulee than a fire safe.
It wasn’t the prototypical kind of agency, because what I couldn’t change felt more emotionally pressing than what I could. Focusing on my own capability and putting myself in the driver’s seat would’ve felt out of place to myself and my family, and rightly so – it would’ve been dodging the situation. But shifting my focus away from my personal capability and seeing where grief took me were solutions to a different problem, the problem of meaning-making. That takes a different set of skills than solving external problems does, and some of them might be skills that look like passivity or witnessing more than they look like working toward a goal. It kind of makes sense to call it agency anyway, recognizing the autonomous, effortful, fruitful work that can be part of grief, but paradoxically, taking an agency orientation tends to obscure it.
I keep thinking about how there’s a skill in taking the back seat and accompanying people through things they can’t control or have decided aren’t worth the trade-offs to avoid. Otherwise agentic people aren’t necessarily good at this skill, even when relinquishing control is a step for addressing their goals. My younger daughter gets fed up with elementary school homework for practicing math skills, but she doesn’t want to homeschool, or get bad grades, or have me talk to her teacher about alternative homework, so I keep her company when it works for our schedule. We gossip about the characters in story problems. We make jokes about how there must be some reason to do all these problems, like maybe every time she simplifies a fraction, it kills a malaria-carrying mosquito. I set a cadence for her focus. My husband is more traditionally agentic, and trying to perform this kind of accompaniment without taking over drives him nuts.
All this makes me wonder, adding onto your question of whether agency might sometimes be counter-productive: Is being an active agent a role that needs balanced by other roles / temperaments (and to some extent depends on them), or is agency something everyone could increase at the same time? Are there certain kinds of knowing that an agency orientation obscures?
There's a lot to enjoy in this piece and reflect on. But, perhaps my favorite part is the fact that you contextualuzed this by telling us you started thinking on this last May and these ideas have been fermenting for a year. I love this because I think we can all use reminders that sometimes thinking can take time to unfold... understanding can evolve and reveal itself over time... and its ok to let ideas simmer. Culturally (meaning, online, social media culture) can really subconsciously leave us feeling this bias towards speed. I find myself slipping into this. And i think it can at times rob me of much richer discussions and ideas.
Henrik--Terrific. Now you see why I choose to serve professionals over 40. The 20-somethings and 30-somethings who write about their success stories and have no agency, often no children either, are not ready for the wisdom and lessons found in the community I've built. I never had children; still, like you, I found agency in other profound relationships and letting go.
Common word, agency - it's one I hear every now and then working with startups. But never have I really understood what it means the way I did from reading your essay, Henrik. Thank you.
"agency" is an interesting word these days. Many people are using it to describe many different aspects, or a combination of them. This piece aligns with how i've thought about it, a combination of self-efficacy (knowing what you want), creativity (figuring out how to get it) and drive(doing the work to get it)
“How to handle being sentenced to freedom,” - this hit hard.
I found freedom more than a decade ago after realizing that I've been living in the shackles of someone else's dream or idea of life.
But what have I done since? How have I handled my sentence? How far have I carried it out?
What can I do now, now that I have agency?
Having experienced a childhood trauma, learning firsthand what it means not to have agency and losing my sense of security at a very young age, agency and freedom are sacred to me.
Thanks for exploring this term in depth. I, too, hope to impart some wisdom to my children.
Congrats on breaking free from the shackles! I, too, had an abusive childhood and a toxic dynamic that I faced head on and broke out of in my early 30s. I was cut out of my family. It was the hardest thing I’ve done but the most important thing I’ve done.
Thank you! And kudos to you for doing the hard thing.
Thank you for putting this so clearly.
Something I’ve been thinking of lately: none of us is agentic in every pocket of life. Parts of our psyche mature on different timelines, so the initiative we show in one aspect can vanish in another.
Someone can look outrageously in charge in area X, then fold like a lawn chair in area Y.
Take Herzog's memoir, where he writes about bolting off to film La Soufrière [before his first divorce]:
“When I spontaneously decided in 1977 to fly to the Caribbean, I stopped at home for a couple of minutes to pick up my passport. There was our little boy, and it was far from clear whether I would return alive. … This is not the sort of behavior that a marriage can tolerate.”
Reading that, I went...huh? How can a man so fiercely agentic in/with making films treat the fallout at home as if it were destiny?
The point is, even the most “put-together” people have blind spots—and vice versa.
You, for example, were more agentic in designing your marriage/romantic life than Herzog was; what you lacked in essay writing then was simply imagination for what was possible (not agency). Herzog shows the opposite imbalance.
I believe that:
- We all have well-lit rooms where we exercise agency.
- And dim corners where we still act like passengers.
Your vaccine-clearing example perfectly illustrates what Ishiguro calls our blindness to possibilities: "if that's all you know, if that's the world you've grown up in, you cannot see the boundaries for which you have to run... You cannot see what you have to rebel against."
https://youtu.be/PIYx14nN9Cw?si=HNOyr99Ddm26wh_M
I think our agency blind spots work similarly - we can't exercise agency in areas where we can't even see that agency is possible there.
And I think that by trading notes (like you’ve done with this essay), we can help each other live more rounded and richer lives.
one of my favourite posts you've written so far. excellent, so true and so important. thank you writing.
Loved it. It's cool that you reshaped the essay around Herzog's life and experiences; it left a strong emotional imprint. Loved this quote:
"The professionals, having too many preconceived ideas about how to go about things, wasted resources and missed the light in the trees."
Your confession that you enjoyed writing essays and thinking on paper but put it off for a long time because you thought you can't make a living that way because there's no essay ecosystem in Sweden made me realize I was doing the exact same thing, in reverse. I feel most alive when I write stories and memoirs. But I was thinking: "There's no way I can make a living in India by writing stories, I need to write non-fiction to establish myself before getting a book deal, or submit stories to magazines first." I was focusing on the form of the solution and not thinking about what function I wanted to solve.
I'm not thinking simple enough, like Herzog did. I could just write stories and post them on my blog here. Instead of wanting to "be" a writer of stories, I can focus on writing "the next story."
P.S. Shoutout to Naomi Kanakia who's doing this already.
My job here is complete.
inspiring me to get on the train (i'm now on) to procure a cheap block of stone and carve it
Such a lovely essay! Makes me wonder if there are simpler solutions to the problems I'm currently tackling
Have you written anything about attunement, i.e., what you refer to when you write "They are not attuned enough to figure out what they want and how the world works"? I find your essays (almost) extremely helpful, but a lot of the high-agency work feels like steps 2, 3, etc., after the step 1 of attuning. When I read about someone like Werzog, who felt a deep calling at 14, it's both inspiring and alienating because the idea of feeling a call like that is as foreign to me now, at 32, as it was when I was 14. I'm probably being naive, but I often think I could problem solve the agency steps... if only I could get the attunement step done first!
That's a very good question. I'll try to write a piece about that
Same, would love to read about the first step of getting clearer about goals, what problems I will enjoy solving etc. For the highly agentic like Herzog, that almost seems to be a given
I’ll always be in awe of the children, like Herzog, who instinctively understand that the “rules” were made up by people just like us, crafted to serve their own purposes. If our vision differs from theirs, why should we follow the same rules? Understanding this is perhaps the greatest qualifier of a person's future chances at success.
I wish I’d understood this sooner. I admire your commitment to pass this sense of freedom to your daughter early on. Thank you for sharing your journey.
For most people, this takes time to learn. But life is long, so if you get to it at 30, 40, there is still so much time left to do good things. This is something I learned to appreciate when I worked with people in their 80s - you can fit so many lifes into a lifetime.
Thank you for this essay! Love to stay up reading stuff like this. It's also so cool that you posted this on my 20th birthday — I am stepping into a new decade, all confused, and it's very timely for me :)
What I struggle with the most with agency is that I don't always know which of my artistic itches I can really control. Creatives often say that there is almost an external force pulling them toward an idea or a project, and I relate to that a lot. In the beginning of the essay you, too, I think, referred to it as something that 'wants to happen through you'. Because it's something else, not you, not even necessarily a part of your Self, it may be unclear that you can, in fact, learn to control. Furthermore, I have even often thought that it's preferable to let a creative force running through you take charge instead. I do, however, believe that my dream creative pursuits are pursue-able :) It's the taming them that's hard!
TLDR: I disagree that a) problems are solvable, b) knowing what one genuinely cares about and acting upon that is sufficient to actually achieving goals.
Slightly Longer version:
a) Some problems are not solvable. Even if I really care about finding an explicit solution to a three body problem, I can't do that. I can't revive people who died, even if I truly care about them. And many other problems, the space of which is limited mostly by my imagination. No matter how agentic I am.
b) Even if I am agentic according to your definition — i.e. I know my goals in life and I am ready to solve all the problems standing on my way — I still have to calculate what proxy goals I need to achieve in order to start nourishing What I Care About. And I seem to have a finite life (another problem, maybe even solvable to some extent), so each day spent on the proxy goals is a day not spent directly on What I Care About. Even if it is totally in accordance with my supposed agency. (I think your example of Herzog living with his mom until 31 is in line with this? There are indeed tradeoffs.) In an extreme case, I could spend all my life fixing obstacles on my path to the Things I Care About, and never even get there. And being agentic doesn't help. Maybe being too agentic even makes things worse.
A lyrical version:
A) Imagine a man. Throughout his youth he was very agentic and managed to figure out that He Cares About his family and, for example, engineering: he loves constructing new awesome things. He already has personal achievements in both areas of his interest, and is looking forward to achieving even more, and, thanks to his agency skills, he knows how to do that.
And then in his mid twenties a war comes. He is conscripted. Some time later, he dies on a battlefield. It turns out, he can't achieve his life goals and pursue what he cares about if he's dead. And he can't solve this problem either. "So maybe not all problems are solvable", he concludes before his last breath.
---
Maybe he was not agentic enough? He definitely checks on the first parts of the agency definition, but maybe he failed to detect the problem in advance or see the reality of the problem? Let's give him another chance. This time let's assume that problems are indeed solvable.
B) Imagine a man. Throughout his youth he was very agentic and managed to figure out that He Cares About his family and, for example, engineering: he loves constructing new awesome things. But, he knows that hard times are ahead. So he decides to put his immediate interests aside for a sec and solve this global problem first to even have an opportunity to solve the actual problems He Cares About later.
Instead of spending his time on engineering, he spends his time on figuring out how to save his world from the upcoming war — maybe he tries to gain political power, maybe he becomes a spy, maybe something else. Since all problems are solvable, in his early twenties he successfully prevents the conflict from happening, his family from experiencing the horrors of war and his own future from ending.
But now he has spent years not enjoying/studying/practicing What He Cares About. So he starts from zero. Additionally, there are other problems in the world that threaten his ability to do engineering, or problems that threaten his family. So again he goes and very agentically solves e.g. climate change. And then something else. Then something else entirely.
He never got to design buildings or bridges or other things he knew he would have liked to work on. "So maybe I should've solved the immortality first" he concludes before his last breath.
---
This time he was strategically solving problems before they could even become dangerous to his goals. And the problems all turned out to be solvable. Except for not having infinite amount of time, of course. If only he could figure out how to manipulate time...
C) Imagine a man. Throughout his youth he was very agentic and managed to figure out That He Cares about his family and, for example, engineering: he loves constructing new awesome things.
Before his country went to war, he did what he could to construct a time machine.
He succeeded, used it to go back to a lot of times and places, destroy all the seeds of the world problems that would prevent him form having a happy family and great engineering achievements, and he finally had to live his infinitely beautiful life. Forever — because he also fixed the heat death of the universe.
That's what didn't happen.
No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't build it -- even though the problem is solvable by assumption, he was too inexperienced and didn't have enough time.
And then in his mid twenties a war comes. He is conscripted. Some time later, he dies on a battlefield. It turns out, he can't achieve his life goals and pursue what he cares about if he's dead. And he can't solve this problem either. "So maybe I should've been doing engineering, like I wanted, and then I would've been happy", he concludes before his last breath.
Thank you for taking the time to write out this story. I liked the effect of the layered endings, how reading it gives you the sense that fixing problems is like trying to squeeze air around a half-empty balloon. I was feeling lonely as I looked through the comments, and now I don’t feel lonely anymore, even though I don’t agree with you, either.
I could quibble that there are other things the would-be engineer could’ve done (e.g. emigrating, arranging an amateur machining injury that would prevent military service, or proactively joining the army corps of engineers, and anyway, trying to build a time machine is already living his dream as an engineer), but none of them would’ve solved the problem of war coming for his family and friends, and finally of death.
I don’t read Henrik’s piece as claiming all problems are solvable, and certainly not that they’re all solvable at the same time. But I remember when my mom was dying, how keenly I felt that what I wanted most was to keep her healthy and alive, and it wasn’t something I could do. It made me resent people whose problems were more solvable, and especially the way they built their worldviews around problems’ solvability. That was sixteen years ago, and looking back, I actually did approach my mom’s death with a fair amount of agency: doing what could be done, recording memories, staying present with it instead of running away, and ultimately letting it change me. I’d rather live like a crème brulee than a fire safe.
It wasn’t the prototypical kind of agency, because what I couldn’t change felt more emotionally pressing than what I could. Focusing on my own capability and putting myself in the driver’s seat would’ve felt out of place to myself and my family, and rightly so – it would’ve been dodging the situation. But shifting my focus away from my personal capability and seeing where grief took me were solutions to a different problem, the problem of meaning-making. That takes a different set of skills than solving external problems does, and some of them might be skills that look like passivity or witnessing more than they look like working toward a goal. It kind of makes sense to call it agency anyway, recognizing the autonomous, effortful, fruitful work that can be part of grief, but paradoxically, taking an agency orientation tends to obscure it.
I keep thinking about how there’s a skill in taking the back seat and accompanying people through things they can’t control or have decided aren’t worth the trade-offs to avoid. Otherwise agentic people aren’t necessarily good at this skill, even when relinquishing control is a step for addressing their goals. My younger daughter gets fed up with elementary school homework for practicing math skills, but she doesn’t want to homeschool, or get bad grades, or have me talk to her teacher about alternative homework, so I keep her company when it works for our schedule. We gossip about the characters in story problems. We make jokes about how there must be some reason to do all these problems, like maybe every time she simplifies a fraction, it kills a malaria-carrying mosquito. I set a cadence for her focus. My husband is more traditionally agentic, and trying to perform this kind of accompaniment without taking over drives him nuts.
All this makes me wonder, adding onto your question of whether agency might sometimes be counter-productive: Is being an active agent a role that needs balanced by other roles / temperaments (and to some extent depends on them), or is agency something everyone could increase at the same time? Are there certain kinds of knowing that an agency orientation obscures?
so many parts of this I want to highlight and remember!
one of my favorite passages:
“The professionals, having too many preconceived ideas about how to go about things, wasted resources and missed the light in the trees.”
Trying to internalize this. Thank you.
There's a lot to enjoy in this piece and reflect on. But, perhaps my favorite part is the fact that you contextualuzed this by telling us you started thinking on this last May and these ideas have been fermenting for a year. I love this because I think we can all use reminders that sometimes thinking can take time to unfold... understanding can evolve and reveal itself over time... and its ok to let ideas simmer. Culturally (meaning, online, social media culture) can really subconsciously leave us feeling this bias towards speed. I find myself slipping into this. And i think it can at times rob me of much richer discussions and ideas.
Henrik--Terrific. Now you see why I choose to serve professionals over 40. The 20-somethings and 30-somethings who write about their success stories and have no agency, often no children either, are not ready for the wisdom and lessons found in the community I've built. I never had children; still, like you, I found agency in other profound relationships and letting go.
Thank you for this post. I just graduated from college and found your words incredibly useful to orient myself.