How to be less agentic
23 Nov 2022 - 11 Oct 2025
- Inspired by Seven ways to become unstoppably agentic - LessWrong Also How to be More Agentic - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions. All the kids want to be more agentic, and who can blame them? I on the other hand can't help seeing the inherent contradictions, by wanting to want better, or something.
- Nobody else seems to be amused by them though.
- My role model here is Doestevky's Underground Man, whose says early on:
Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything.
Higher things
- Meditation (see gaining idea )
- Other forms of religiosity. Disdain your precious egoic will and submit yourself to higher powers.
Interrogate the very concept of agency
- See this whole hypertext.
- Recognize that you are a causally-embedded complex machine and freedom is an illusion.
- Accept the stances in anti-purpose
Politics
- Subsume your agency to a movement. Help build its collective consciousness. Your individual agency is not important compared to the thrill of being part of something larger, the agency of history.
- Yes this has exactly the same emotional structure as religion, duh.
Detach yourself from the conspiracy
- Recognize that the whole system of achievment and status is bullshit.
- Recognize that your goals might not be your own, and what you think of as "agentic" is a conspiracy to steal your slack (see below).
- Drop out of society and find your real goals. This was and is the function of the actual counterculture. I guess this is actually being more agentic (that was the whole raison d'etre of Whole Earth Catalog ). But to outsiders it may not look that way.
Lower things
- Join The Church of The SubGenius, learn how to cultivate slack which is much better than agency. Also see Dudeism
- Drugs are a pretty good technique for subverting agency. Marijuana in particular is said to lead to lower motivation, which is supposed to be bad, but maybe it just changes the structure of your goals and agency (see hippies above).
