All the Worst People Seem to Want to Be ‘High Agency’ |
All the Worst People Seem to Want to Be ‘High Agency’
Ms. Haigney is working on her first book, a collection of essays about collecting.
I first noticed the phrase when it cropped up in conversations among my friends, as a dichotomy: Were we “high agency” or “low agency”? Intuitively, I had a sense of what that meant, and which side of that divide I should want to be on. Was inertia or timidity keeping us in a city, a job or a relationship? Or were we the captains of the ships of our own lives, thinking about career pivots, trying out vibe-coding, remembering that we could move to the desert and start a whole new life?
When asked what skills to develop in the age of A.I., the first one Sam Altman listed was, “Become high agency.” Google search interest in “high agency” has been increasing for five years and spiked enormously in the past year. In a recent article for Harper’s, Sam Kriss noted that in tech job interviews, it’s now common for prospective employees to be asked whether they were “mimetic" or “agentic.”
The basic idea of “agency” has long been theorized and debated in philosophy, in relation to free will and the human capacity for action. It caught on in Silicon Valley, which has long embraced phrases like, “Move fast, break things” and more recently, “You can just do things.” And then “high agency” wormed its way out of tech and into the broader lexicon, cycling through viral X threads, LinkedIn posts, and podcasts with self-help leanings. I even noticed my students in a writing class I taught at Yale starting to use it.
“High agency” is now being branded as a personality trait. It implies decisiveness, self-assurance and a willingness to take risks, a predilection for thinking “outside the box” and questioning systems. Some people have more agency innately, but you can cultivate it, at least according to the many online guides to cultivating yours. A low-agency person is a cog in the machine, working a regular job, spending too much time answering emails. They’re what in video games might be called a “nonplayer character.” A high-agency person, on the other hand, might start a company young, spend their mornings writing a novel, or get into a prestigious college and decide not to go — time and money that could be spent more efficiently elsewhere, according to the new logic.
It’s good to recognize that you have the power to shape your day-to-day life. You are not entirely at the whim of the forces around you: a bad boss, a stuck-in-the-mud relationship, even the macro forces of the volatile world. An example of high-agency behavior that one of my Yale students gave me: If your button falls off your shirt, do you sew it back on yourself? This vision of agency embodied a resourcefulness that seemed old-fashioned. Indeed, agency is a stark departure from the buzzwords that circulated when I was in college a decade ago. Back then, we talked about how things were “structural,” perhaps to a fault. Agency in its best form is something like Emerson’s notion of self-reliance: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”
“High agency” is individualistic, which means systems are suspect. Britain’s National Health Service, railways, and the American Department of Education? They are all being run in extremely low-agency ways, according to George Mack, an entrepreneur who helped popularize the idea. Education in general is viewed as undermining agency. You’re learning how to stand in line, not studying how to cut it.
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