Jan 11, 2024
I’ve always had an urge to make useful things. As a child, I liked to “invent,” which mostly amounted to dreaming up interesting (and fantastical) uses for things I learned about, like jumping boots powered by memory wire, or a functional replica of Thor’s hammer energized via triboelectricity.
I was a huge LEGO nerd, spending much of my spare time on my basement floor constructing vehicles and buildings and imagining the stories of the characters who piloted or inhabited them.
(The basement, I learned, was the ideal location for building with LEGO—the cooler temperature kept my hands from getting clammy.)
In high school, I took engineering elective courses, completing projects such as a hydraulic arm made of wood and syringes, and a load-bearing balsa-wood bridge. When I got to college, I started studying mechanical engineering, intending to pursue my interest in building things through to a career.
In my second semester of college, I took a MATLAB programming course. (I had dabbled in some Java and Python programming in high school, but not extensively.) This MATLAB course made me realize what I was missing out on. Code was, to me, the ultimate medium for creating useful things.
In The Mythical Man-Month, author and software pundit Fred Brooks touches on this concept of the creativity of code:
The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures… Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. […] The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.
His wording is admittedly a bit grandiose, but the awe and wonder you feel when you successfully solve a problem using code is real. Code is incredibly versatile and at the same time incredibly practical. I saw this versatility and practicality, and pivoted my university study towards a degree in Computer Science.
Partway through those studies, I had a thought about software that changed this trajectory again. I was using a browser extension to block distracting websites, and noticed that I felt a sense of indignant defiance when the allotted time ran out and the extension kicked me off a given site. (I did not know this at the time, but psychologists refer to this phenomenon as reactance). This got me thinking: could software be built to work with my mind to achieve my desired outcomes instead of trying to strong-arm it into compliance?
I decided to add a minor in Psychology to my degree to explore this question. This proved to be an extremely useful decision, both in understanding myself and in understanding people in general. (I am now of the opinion that an introductory psychology course should be a required class for all students.) But my intent in adding a psych minor was specifically so that I could “create software that uses psychology to help people,” as I explained it to others at the time.
Over the subsequent years, this goal took me in many directions. I considered, dabbled with, and ultimately discarded several different app ideas: a timeboxing app that tried to use reinforcement learning to promote focus, a prompted gratitude journal app, an app for emotional regulation, an app for reflective journaling and intentional meaning-seeking, etc.
As I worked through those ideas, my focus on “helping people” gradually distilled to “helping people live intentionally.” Last summer, as I read several books and articles about this idea, it became even more crystallized. Two works in particular come to mind as having been nucleation sites for this crystallization.
The first was Ross Ellenhorn’s book How We Change (And Ten Reasons Why We Don’t), which I quoted in last week’s newsletter. This book emphasizes the concept of agency thinking and the opposing allure of living in “bad faith,” in which we mentally frame ourselves as puppets in a puppet show—objects, rather than agents. Ellenhorn frames both changing and staying the same as acts that can be agentic, intentional decisions. Quoting from the book again:
When you choose sameness, you’re choosing to shelter your hope from disappointment. That’s an act, not a state of passivity, as so often assumed. It is a strategic retreat, not a surrender. A big part of the motivation for choosing sameness is to preserve hope and protect the part of you that authors your life.
The second was Nadia Asparouhova’s essay “Cultivating Agency.” At its core, it’s a critique of antinatalism, which is the belief that people should not have children. Asparouhova’s conclusion is that movements that promote antinatalism do so because of “a belief in the lack of personal agency.”
If “grit” – the desire to persevere when faced with a challenge, popularized by psychologist Angela Duckworth – has been the human trait du jour of the last fifteen-odd years, I suspect that “agency” – a belief in one’s ability to influence their circumstances – could be the defining trait of the next generation.
…
If you believe that the world is shaped by your and others’ actions, then the climate crisis or other global catastrophic risk don’t look quite so scary: they’re an opportunity to do something meaningful. If you believe that the world’s problems are solved by people, then having children doesn’t seem like a waste of resources; it seems, in fact, like the most good you could do in the world.
(Asparouhova uses agency to refer to what I call agency thinking. I prefer the latter term because it separates the ability to change one’s circumstances, or what I would call agency, from the belief in that ability.)
Asparouhova points to learning to code as an example of teaching agency, which mirrors my discovery of the incredible creative power of code. At the end, though, her essay leaves the general question open for the reader to ponder: how can agency thinking be cultivated?
Paired with Ellenhorn’s adroit exposition of bad faith and the underlying agentic nature of both change and sameness, this essay helped me identify the Big Idea I was digging towards:
Agency thinking—our agency and our awareness of it—is critical for both personal and societal change. Given that, understanding how to cultivate agency thinking is extremely valuable for individuals; for parents, teachers, and leaders; and for society as a whole.
At first, I continued in the direction I was in before—building an app to address the problem I was focused on. But I realized two things that made me shelve this idea, at least for now.
The first realization was a sudden one, as I was driving to work one day. I had spent the evenings of the previous week writing an article on my personal blog, and was now returning my focus to the agentic-living app I was presently envisioning. I noticed how starkly different I felt personally when focused on writing vs. when focused on building an app. As I wrote in my journal that evening:
Focusing on building an app makes me possessive of my time and angry when I don’t get to work on it (and often angry when I do, because of how slow it goes). But when my focus is on my writing, I feel expanded, more emotionally healthy, and a lot more patient with changes to our schedule that limit my time to write.
The second realization was a more gradual one. When I started my blog, I wrote about how writing is “an incredible tool for communication and the synthesis of new ideas” and “a powerful way of making meaning of the complexity of life.” But I’ve realized that it’s even more than that—it’s one of the most potent mechanisms for advancing a problem forward at a societal level. Arguably every person who has ever meaningfully impacted the world has done so using writing (either their own, or someone else’s writing of their words or ideas).
Writing is, in a sense, the original programming language, and it has the same agency-promoting effect. The propagation of literacy after the invention of the printing press has been credited with sparking the emergence from the Dark Ages—a massive, society-level upward surge in agency thinking.
Taking those two things together, focusing on writing about these ideas seemed like the most strategic step forward. It is sufficiently open-ended that I can follow the idea where it leads, while still being concrete enough to share meaningfully with others (which is itself helpful in the exploration).
That open-ended-ness is something I want to emphasize: I’m not “there yet.” Innerhelm isn’t so much the result of these thoughts about agency thinking as it is a vessel of curiosity sailing out into these ideas—heading into the unknown, tacking against the wind now and then, but determined to find land.
Thanks for coming along for the voyage. I’m excited to see what we’ll find. ⛵
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