(Crossposted from my Substack; written as part of the Halfhaven virtual blogging camp.)

The way I see it, there are three kinds of agency, each more advanced than the last:

• Level 1: Saying yes when your instinct is to say no. (Your friend is a boxer, and invites you to a boxing gym.)
• Level 2: Signing up for things even when nobody invited you to. (You don’t know anyone who does boxing, but you think it’d be good for you, so you sign up.)
• Level 3: Doing things you can’t sign up for. Things you have to figure out on your own. (You wonder why there’s no group-combat martial art, so you invent one and start a club.)

With Level 1, the invitation can be implicit. I learned to juggle because my grandma happened to have some juggling balls. I didn’t see someone juggling on TV and decide somehow that my life would be improved if I could juggle. Some juggling balls just landed in my lap, and I accepted the implicit invitation. It still took more agency than just throwing them up in the air a few times and then giving up.

When I try to think of explicit examples of Level 1 agency in my life, it’s kinda hard. I’m very introverted, which means I probably have a lot less people doing things in my periphery than most people would. This is a bad thing! Level 1 is probably the highest-impact level in people’s lives even if it’s the least powerful because it’s so damned easy. You just say yes, then go with a new flow. All that said, here are a few examples from my life I managed to think of:

• Dancing at a school event.
• Going on a scary ride at Disneyland. My dad, not wanting to go on the ride, said, “I’ll go on it if Taylor goes on it.” I said yes because I thought it would be funny that his plan backfired.
• Doing intensive, daily group therapy. Suggested by my doctor back when I struggled with mental health issues. It was not my favorite idea, but I saw the potential and I accepted. That was the right decision.
• Giving in to pressure from a friend to get a personal trainer. I had already considered getting a personal trainer at Level 2, but once a friend brought it down to Level 1 by pressuring me, it was easy to accept.
• Letting my girlfriend-at-the-time start breeding lizards in our apartment. This one took really not a lot of agency from me to be honest. I just had to put up with occasionally waking up with a beetle crawling across my chest, or stepping in lizard poop. But it was definitely more interesting than the alternative.

Level 2 is harder. Rather than accepting the tray of options that you’re handed by the people around you, you have to start thinking, “what is my life missing? What do other people do that I haven’t considered doing?”

Here are some Level 2 examples of agency from my life:

• Learning the rules of D&D and being a DM for my friends because it seemed fun. I’d never even played D&D before, so running a game as a DM was difficult. But I’d seen Youtube videos of D&D (the PAX D&D games) and wanted to try it. I ended up playing for many years and am only not playing now for lack of a good group. (Anyone know any high-agency ways of finding a group of people who both like D&D and shower regularly?)
• Going to university on the other side of the country instead of picking one of the two universities everyone at my high school was going to.
• Trying swing dancing.
• Trying Toastmasters.
• Doing karate as a kid.
• Doing boxing as an adult.
• Building a lumenator.
• Starting a Substack. And actually posting on it.
• Doing online courses. Pretty sure the one I took on Elixir in university led to me getting my current job.
• Joining clubs, like a writing club or a video game dev club.
• Doing hackathons and game jams. I don’t even want to be a game dev, but I’ve done game jams over the years because they’re just fun.
• Doing 1-on-1 therapy and life coaching. I never had the experience of someone saying, “you should try therapy.” Instead I reasoned that therapy would be a good solution to the problems I was having, and I tried it. I got middling results.
• Learn to dress better by looking at r/malefashionadvice on reddit. I think if you want to understand how to dress well, reading about fashion and trying to understand it logically is one thing, but there’s something really powerful about just looking at 1000 pictures of well-dressed people and doing unconscious pattern matching on that data. Don’t use your CPU when you can use your GPU!
• Buy books on social anxiety and read them. The Charisma Myth actually cut my social anxiety by like 30% just by having read it, with no further work needed. Some books are like that. I’d say How to Win Friends and Influence People improved my interpersonal relationships by some hard to measure but very large amount. Generally if you’re choosing what books to read based on some research you did, rather than what you happened to come across naturally, that’d be Level 2 agency.

With Level 2 you’re starting to break free from the script you were given, but you’re still limited by the imagination of other people. In Level 3, you’re using your own imagination, reasoning from first principles what your life is lacking and figuring out how to get it, even if that involves doing something that isn’t normal for anyone you’re aware of.

Some Level 3 examples from my life:

• Going beyond what was expected in a school assignment to a ridiculous extent, just for fun.
• Taking online dating seriously, rather than passively swiping or hoping I randomly bump into “the one”. I reasoned from first principles that having a good partner is very valuable, and that online dating was a numbers game. So I borrowed my friend’s DSLR camera, took good outdoor pictures, and used this website that lets strangers vote on which of your pictures is the best so I didn’t have to rely on my own judgment for that. I researched Tinder bios and put effort into my bio. I swiped like crazy on two dating apps. I paid for premium. If you’re online dating but not paying for premium, I invite you to do some napkin math on the estimated value of a good partner. I predict you’ll realize premium is under-priced compared to the value you receive by several orders of magnitude, and then you’ll pay for it. All this led to me going on several dates a week until I found my current girlfriend, who I have been with for years and am very happy with.
• My LLM board game experiment. I didn’t have to make a bunch of people play board games against AI just to write a blog post, but I did.
• Social anxiety exposure on Omegle. Back before Omegle shut down, I went on there for periods of at least 90 minutes talking to strangers. Totalling maybe 20-30 hours. I cut down on my social anxiety about 50% doing that. Not bad for 20-30 hours of work. I would have done more, but I felt like I was getting diminishing returns and also disliked it. (If you have ideas for high-agency ways to cut down on social anxiety, let me know. Joining clubs traditionally hasn’t done it for me because my anxiety makes me too standoffish to connect with others in those situations. Though I am improving.)
• Joining the Halfhaven blogging challenge, of which this post is a part. (Joining an existing challenge should be Level 1 except I was planning on doing a nearly identical challenge on my own starting in the same month already.)
• I used to come up with a lot of 1-2 month challenges, and invited friends to participate. I think getting other people involved is probably a powerful element of Level 3 that I’ve often missed, but I have done challenges like reading challenges, fitness challenges including a yoga challenge, a standing desk challenge, technology detox challenge, etc. I haven’t done these recently, but I think challenges are a good way to dip your toe into something and see what it’s like.

I can’t think of as many examples of Level 3 agency because it’s just hard to be that creative. Life as a human being mostly involves copying what others are doing, and only occasionally can a diligent person catch a glimpse through the matrix. Level 3 agency is also the worst to have to rely on, because the opportunities are hard to spot, and you’ll have less encouragement from others to help you follow through (unless you recruit others). But the potential upside of Level 3 agency is the highest. This is the realm of genius business ideas, cutting edge research, and brilliant art. Level 3 is doing what other people can’t even imagine.