The Best Thing I Read This Week: The Most Precious Resource is Agency

The best thing I read this week was The Most Precious Resource is Agency by Simon Sarris, about agency and the systematic dismantling of opportunities.

Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to do something differently from, or in addition to, the events that simply happen to you. Most famous people go off-script early, usually in more than one way.

For most of history, there were plenty of opportunities for people to gain agency—but Simon argues that we’ve lost many of them.

The world until recently was overflowing with onramps of opportunity, even for children, and we seem to do poorly at producing new ones. Modern complexity may have erased some avenues for agency (no boy can meaningfully learn the telegraph), but I suspect how we have oriented the world, not technology, is the main problem. 13-year-old Steve Jobs called Bill Hewlett and received a summer job at HP, which would be unsurprising in Carnegie’s time, was certainly surprising for 1968, and is obviously verboten today.

He suggests that our approach to education may be part of the problem.

Who could blame young adults for thinking that work is fake and meaningless if we prescribe fake and meaningless work for the first two decades of their existence? By confining meaningful work to an adult-only activity, it is little wonder that adolescence is a period of great depression.

Software development might be one of the last bastions of agency. From my own experience, everything Simon says about the industry rings true.

There are good reasons that programming is now the typical industry for precocious children. It is something parents can still allow their children to do despite systematized schooling, and it is also one of the few industries with a permissionless culture. You don’t have to ask anyone. You don’t have to get a building permit or be a professional. You can just create. This too is a big change from the pre-internet era, and incidentally the reason I became a programmer. I wanted to make things, school did not offer avenues to create, but Geocities did. In fact it was one of the only sources in my childhood simply saying, you don’t have to wait for professionals to tell you how to make stuff, you can just make stuff. Start typing.