Tapping Glass

As agency has been hollowed out, so too has the life it produces. Agency requires self-determined action, yet nobody acts alone. Naturally we feel isolated. Of all the qualities that make individual spirit and action possible, none is more crucial than strong connections to other people. We become individuals mostly through our experiences with people.

This is counter intuitive. We tend to think of agency by what it produces: a sense of independence and freedom. Rarely discussed are the inputs. Our sense of agency emerges from the initial conditions and ongoing richness of our personal, intimate and work relationships. When these relationships weaken, so does our sense of independence.

A longtime friend and I often joke, "I'm a sovereign nation state!" It's a reference to a 400-year-old transformation in Europe that established the modern idea that nations have a right to self-governance, free from outside interference. We joke about it because life often feels like interference and it reminds us that we remain individuals.

We made that joke up 16 years ago and yet agency has made its way into the zeitgeist because it's exactly what many people struggle to feel. Among those who do, the harder challenge is whether it can be acted upon.

The reasons are many, but isolation is among the biggest. Isolation has become a normal way to live, especially for younger people who have grown up under the crushing weight of programmatic curation everywhere. A boring, needlessly complicated digital world. We all live here, tapping glass. It's a kind of nothingness that occupies so much of our time.

People want change. You can feel it. But change requires a sense that things aren't too good and could be better. The 'could be better' has to be believable enough that the risk of acting differently is outweighed by the reward of what is better. Then the question is no longer whether things will change, but what they will change into.