I have large backlog of reader-suggested topics and questions, so I will start working my way through them. This one comes from a therapist in the Dallas area named Tyler Woodall. You can learn more about the cool work he is doing here.
"In a future post or any forum, really, I'd love to see your thoughts on two words/ideas I've been wrestling with recently. Together or separately doesn't matter to me: Hope & Agency"
I love the pairing of these two words from Tyler. They don't seem to have a lot in common at first glance, but as I let them bounce around in my head, I started to notice more and more links between them, and I started to see the relationship as more and more important.
Let's take them individually.
Here are the definitions I am working from:
Hope: a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.
Agency: a feeling of control over our actions and their consequences.
Hope
The Sandman graphic novel series by Neil Gaiman is in the top five best things I've ever read. It can be pretty dark, so it may not for everyone, but if that doesn't bother you, you should check it out.
I don't want to give too much away, but there is a scene where Morpheus, the main character, has to retrieve something stolen from him by a demon. He is too weak to just take it from him, so they engage in a battle of wits to see who gets it. It begins as one of them becomes something, and then the other one has to become something that destroys that thing. The game ends when one of them names something that the other cannot destroy.
It starts pretty basic, with the demon becoming a wolf and Morpheus answering as a hunter. The demon becomes a horsefly that stings the horse and it throws the hunter, so Morpheus becomes a spider that eats the horsefly. The demon becomes a snake that eats the spider, Morpheus becomes an ox that crushes the snake, and the demon becomes Anthrax and kills the ox.
It gets a little more cosmic as Morpheus becomes a planet that nurtures life, so the demon becomes a nova that incinerates the planet. Morpheus becomes the universe that creates life, and the demon responds by becoming anti-life, "the dark at the end of everything."
The demon is smug, thinking he has won, and the live audience they are doing this in front of seems to agree until Morpheus becomes the one thing that nothing can destroy: he becomes hope.
Hope is important.
It may be the most important thing we can have in our lives.
Hope is what keeps us moving each day. It's the thing that makes life worth living.
We all have different degrees of hope.
Some of us think everything will be OK and look forward to the future. Some of us think everything is doomed, and it's a matter of time before this all collapses.
Some of us see a bright future for our children as technology and humanity work together to improve everything. Some of us see a strange blend of the Terminator and the Matrix where our children are enslaved by a giant super intelligence.
Both groups of people have some degree of hope, or they wouldn't even be trying anymore. Even the doomsday preppers hope they will survive and help their children survive, or they wouldn't bother doing what they're doing. Hope keeps us moving, no matter how dark things appear to be.
Agency
One of, if not the most frequent, conversations I've had with clients over the past 12 years has been about the inverse relationship between security and freedom. In general, the more security you have in your life, the less freedom you have. The more freedom you have, the less security.
Let's break it down.
Most secure, well-paying jobs have requirements about when you will be there and what you will do while you are there. You have a lot of security in your job, with very little freedom. The other side of this equation would be something like freelancing. Because of my near-pathological choice of freedom over security in every situation, I get to do what I want all the time, but there's always the threat of clients canceling and more jobs not coming through. I have a lot of freedom, with very little security.
This often comes up when discussing relationships with clients as well. Being married, I have a lot of security that my wife will be there, and I will not be alone. That being said, part of our agreement is that I am not allowed to date other people, and neither is she. We both have the security of our relationship, but we are not free to be with other people.
On the other hand, I know people who are serially non-monogamous and have the freedom to date a lot of people. They seem to enjoy this, but they often struggle with not having the security of knowing someone will be there for them in the long run.
I don't think either of these is necessarily good or bad; you just have to be honest with yourself about which you prefer. My wife is a security person, so the move to real estate was difficult for her. As I said, I am pathologically freedom-oriented, so even a high-paying job with great benefits would be difficult for me.
A lot of this comes down to the role of agency in your life. Some people require a high degree of agency to be happy. In contrast, other people are willing to trade their agency for security.
There are a lot of things that can restrict a person's agency. Some people's agency is restricted by the government or political system they live under. Some people's agency is restricted by the circumstances of their lives. Some people's agency is restricted by their own choices.
My own agency was restricted by my own choices for a long time. At an early age, I allowed myself to develop relationships with people, drugs, and alcohol that limited my agency by setting my priorities for me. This went on for a long time.
I've always been on the freedom side of things. I've always struggled with being told what to do. It's my nature. This led me to make decisions around drugs and alcohol and other lifestyle choices. Nobody got to tell me what to do; I was going to do what I wanted to do.
Ironically, these choices removed agency from my life. Because I chose to drink and use drugs, I spent years of my life chasing drugs and alcohol. I chose who I dated who I spent time with based on drugs and alcohol. I chose jobs that wouldn't drug test me and I lived with people who wouldn't question the way I behaved. I was still making choices, but they were heavily coerced.
These days, true agency is what I look for. It’s the basis of every choice I make, and trying to help other people find more agency in their lives is why I write this newsletter. I do not allow things into my life that restrict my agency. I do not allow people into my life who restrict my agency. So much of what they tell us is freedom in our modern culture is actually leveraging your rebellion to put you under the control of the forces that seek to manipulate you.
Hope and Agency
The close ties between hope and agency may not be immediately apparent, but they are intrinsically linked. A person without hope has no agency. There's nothing for them to look forward to, they do not believe in anything, so their decisions are essentially made for them for long as they remain hopeless. Hopelessness puts you on the path of choiceless living because your choices do not matter.
Similarly, a lack of agency will create hopelessness. I cannot convey the crushing hopelessness of realizing you are in a situation that you do not like but cannot escape from if you have not experienced it. Not having agency is spirit-destroying. This is why we have always used confinement and restriction as punishments. Few things are worse than taking a person's choices away from them. This leads to hopelessness very quickly.
You need hope to have agency and agency to have hope, but you can use them in tandem to foster each other.
I have been teaching Mae how to ride her bike even though she is convinced she is already an expert and doesn't need any help. She does pretty good for a little while, but she inevitably pushes back on the pedals and hits the brake. I am showing her how to push down with one pedal and then the other to keep her momentum going. The trick for her lies in getting over that tipping point at the top of each rotation to keep moving forward.
Hope and agency worked the same way. I use my agency to choose hope on a daily basis. I don't have an inherently hopeful mind. I see all the problems in people; I see all the problems in the world. I'm good at identifying the things that are not working.
This is part of what makes me an effective coach. If I'm not careful, though, all I see are problems, which is pretty easy to do in our modern world. So, I use the agency I have to generate hope by focusing on the things that are going well and helping the people I can help.
I then use this hope to generate more agency. Whenever I feel hopeful about something, I head that direction. If something brings me excitement or joy, I make sure to bring more of it into my life. Like all good things, hope and agency feed themselves. Hope leads to more hope, and using your agency wisely brings you more agency in life.
It can be a tricky balance, and sometimes it's hard to get started. It's that difficult place at the top of the pedal. You just have to figure out which one you have even a bit more of and push down on it until you have some momentum. If you have more hope, use it to do things that excite you and create agency. If you have more agency direct it toward the things that bring you hope, and you'll get rolling.
It's a lot easier after that.