At the begining, you had no agency at all. You were a baby who couldn’t decide what to do, what to eat, you couldn’t even think. This is where all of us started, as objects. Not as sentient creatures who decide, but as a child, unburdened by the decisions that would hound us for the rest of our lives.
As you grow into childhood you start gaining awareness, your parents teach you how to make small decisions, and you wrestled those decisions from them. You decide what you want to eat, the clothes you want to wear, where to walk. You force your surroundings to conform to these decisions to acquire one thing, to feel important.
This continues on to adolesence and teen years. But right around your early twenties something starts to feel different. You choices start to resemble something other than freedom. Your decisions start taking longer and your questions start getting harder. This is right around the time when your choices carry real weight. Late-night-outs turn into sluggish days turn into work-related mistakes which turns into financial crises. You start to question what it was that made you so driven to be independent.
This transtition happens to everyone at a certain point in their lives. The age of onset varies, and it all depends on how high-agency the particular person is. Some reach a breaking point at 25, others keep going until 45. Whats certain is that the breaking point will come. This is not a sign of weakness or incompetence. It is simply a fact that the world has infinite possibilities of outcome that when you place the responsibility for both the choice and the result it carries on your shoulders, you will find a problem that is so big that it can crush you.
And thats where the fork between Agency and Faith appears. When you get to the point of singularity for your responsibilities. You need to decide whether to break down, or trust in something outside of yourself. This choice brings a lot of suffering with it.
Because for the first half of our lives, agency means discipline, it means network, it means entrepreneurship, it means strength, it means freedom. We have been trained on the idea that to take control is the best thing! But forget that the freedom to make a choice carries with it the responsibility of its outcome.
People who has built their identity as someone with high agency suffers the most during this stage. They fear that to put faith in something other than themselves makes them weak and uncertain. They might say “I’ve built this company from nothing, but why can’t I fix my relationship with my mother”. As if the infinite variables presented by life even presuposes that any of it can be controlled by a single person.
It stresses these people to realize that this particular problem requires them to relinquish control instead of acquiring it. The fact is, responsibility is required for growth, but too much of it can crush you. Human beings need to share that burden with something: Karma, The universe, Buddha, Allah, Jesus, etc. Any higher order of good would be better than to face the weight of these choices alone.
And once the choice is made, you’ll suprise yourself at how much more productive you’ll become. Because our minds are crowded with distractions, questions, uncertainty, and worry, that once you off-load those thoughts to something else, you can finally focus on the things that matter.
It takes Agency to develop yourself up to a certain point, and then Faith will carry you the rest of the way.