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.
If the agency boosters are individualistic, though, this new individualism is not the old-school vision of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps or climbing the ladder. Case in point: The buzz around “high agency” can perhaps be traced to a 2016 podcast (of course) with Eric Weinstein, former managing director of Thiel Capital. According to Mr. Weinstein, a high-agency person would think, “How am I going to start a business when my credit is terrible and I have no experience?” The traditional answer to that question would be: You don’t. You get a job, clock in, clock out, put a bit in your 401(k) every month, build your credit, and then you can start thinking about starting a business. This vision of success is decidedly out of vogue, and not only in Silicon Valley. The slow, incremental buildup of a life and a career, the accumulation of savings and experience — this seems to hold less appeal to younger generations.
And why would it? The future feels volatile and the rewards of labor are unequal, even absurd: Some people are making stupid money betting on Kalshi, while the job market for recent college graduates is contracting and prices are rising. Nearly half of U.S. adults believe they’ll never be able to afford a home they love, no matter how hard they work, so what would be the point of saving for one? Why not have a little agency and bet it all on red?
But, of course, risk is different for people in different circumstances. There’s that pesky intrusion of “the structural”: There are people who can afford, literally afford, to take big risks — and others for whom starting a business with terrible credit and no experience is simply a bad idea. The valorization of “high agency” is emblematic of a moment when risk-taking is overvalued. It’s an ethos for a gambler’s time, and we’re living in one.
Donald Trump, by running for president with no government experience, was exhibiting extremely high agency; this might even be why it’s an idea that’s so suited for this particular moment. (“You can just do things” — like bomb Iran.) The historical examples Mr. Mack provides in his essay “High Agency in 30 Minutes” include: Wilbur Wright, Elon Musk, Mr. Beast and a 6-year-old who taught himself how to start a business using YouTube. Mr. Mack also includes a famous old photograph of a man refusing to salute amid a crowd all heiling Hitler. Standing up to Nazi Germany? High-agency behavior, apparently. But it struck me that, in a different time, we would have called that “courage.” That word has fallen out of fashion. And there’s a reason. “Courage” has a moral valence that agency doesn’t. Agency is about action, but it tells us nothing of direction.
You can just do things, sure, but what will you do? In the 21st century in America, we’ve collectively lost a sense of moral guidance and don’t even know exactly where to look for it. But it’s still worth looking. To valorize agency without also emphasizing its purpose allows us to ignore harder questions like: How do I live a good life? And what about the collective good? The smash-and-grab mentality elides these questions. Have we forgotten that life might be better lived in concert with others?
Some of our focus on agency might come from a place of fear. People often refer to “agency” as an A.I.-proof trait, a lifeboat, when we’re afraid of being replaced by machines. Even Mr. Altman said so. And yet, ironically, we also talk about A.I. in terms of agency. Bots are agents. People are letting their agents run their lives. (Amusingly, there are two podcasts on Spotify called “High Agency,” one devoted to business and another to A.I. builders.)
We may not agree on whether or not Claude can attain consciousness, but we do agree it can just do things. It can just do things all day long, in fact, and at a faster pace than we can. A.I. can act — without its own direction, but with incredible efficiency and effectiveness. It’s telling that we also use the word “agency” to describe the nature of this action. Maybe this is the endpoint of all this “high agency”: constant hamster wheels of action, unmoored from any values, no compass to be found.
Sophie Haigney is working on her first book, a collection of essays about collecting. She is an advisory editor at The Paris Review.
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