Low Agency, High Consciousness

A couple of months ago there was a minor thinkpiece trend about the push, especially among Silicon Valley types, to be "high agency". It feels somewhat appropriate to be writing this after the hype cycle has passed since I consider myself a fairly low agency person, but I've been chewing on it for a while and figured I should finally write this down. I'm not sure if people are even still talking about it this way or if they've moved on to Marc Andreesen's favorite self-improvement technique - I'm not on Twitter and I largely try to minimize the psychic damage online trends can inflict on me, so maybe no one is even talking about their level of agency anymore. Not my problem.

The thing that interests me about high agency people is whether they have consciousness. I have a running theory that, for example, Cluely founder Roy Lee isn't conscious. He is what David Chalmers calls a p-zombie - walks and talks like a person, but has no interiority. I don't really know how you can have the full breadth of human experience and do the things he does otherwise.

Consciousness, of course, is hard to define, and it is a matter of much debate whether anyone has it at all. I don't want to get to deep into the weeds here, so I'll just say that my personal belief is that consciousness is related heavily to the physical and emotional. In the words of a better philosopher than I, to be conscious there must be something it is like to be you. This is tied to the ability to feel, and to recognize a concrete self that is doing the feeling. And, at least for me, it is especially tied to the ability to feel bad. There's a reason they call it self-consciousness. Anxiety, shame, guilt, worry: these are among the markers of a truly conscious being. They require an awareness of the self, the capacity to model the future, and, ideally, a deep sense of empathy, the ability to consider the wellbeing and the self of others with the same gravity you consider your own self. On the other hand, acting selfishly often means acting out of pure animal instinct: letting your hindbrain control you before your higher consciousness can weigh in.

Being high agency doesn't sound bad on its own: emphasizing decisiveness, boldness, thinking outside the box. But when it's combined with the actual context of its popularity, which seems to mostly be B2B startups and bland, textureless LLM wrappers, you have to question what they actually mean. I do not particularly think the willingness to commit financial crimes is a positive form of agency.

What people are calling high agency, and its attendant forms of "maxxing", seem to me to be simply valorizing a form of psychopathy. It is taking pride in not worrying about the consequences of your actions on other people, on prioritizing yourself, on WINNING forever. It is killing the conscious mind to further the ego. In short it's just the latest in a long line of schools of thought meant to justify the enormous cruelty it takes to be successful in America. At least "greed is good" was straightforward about that.

To be clear, excepting Roy Lee, I don't actually think most of the highly agentic individuals ruining our world have no consciousness. I just think they have less of it. I imagine most of them would take pride in that fact! Introspection and its hateful twin, rumination, are the markers of what I'd consider to be high levels of consciousness, and it's no secret that our agentic would-be titans view these things contemptuously. By emphasizing not spending time thinking and feeling, they reduce their level and range of consciousness in favor of their ability to act. It's ironic that many of these people refer to the less agentic as "NPCs". You are literally trying to have less interiority! You're trying to kill your internal monologue! Being evil doesn't make you any less of an NPC!

A lot of philosophers have tried to identify the ideal blend of being in the world and being in the mind, what Heidegger calls "Dasein". To fully be human we must be able to synthesize our consciousness with the real world. It's not about being maximally agentic or maximally conscious, but finding a balance between the two. To know that you will die and simultaneously be able to live.

I could probably use a little more agency and a little less consciousness in my life, to be honest. I am sure it is no coincidence that, as a deeply anxious person, my conception of what it means to be conscious is inextricably tied to introspection and empathy. And it's quite likely that I place too much weight on my own capacity for mental torture because it is such a significant part of my own conscious experience. But I would not trade it for the highly agentic person's world, because I believe that becoming more conscious is the point of being alive. Being more aware, feeling more, understanding myself and others. These are the things that give my life meaning.

Agency has an important place in this process. Acting, making decisions, making mistakes: these are all opportunities to grow our conscious self. But agency treated as the end rather than the means is just a way of making yourself less than you could be. Action without meaning, signifying nothing. Maybe this way of looking at the world means I'll never get VC funding but it does seem like a good way of ensuring I do not end up an empty shell.