High agency is a batch of personality traits composed of confidence, struggle, self-awareness, and psychological prowess. In this writing you’ll learn the traits of what makes someone high agency, and how you can apply it to your life. Identification of this individual is the first step to freedom of mind.
Subtle Confidence
Every word, every action/reaction, micro expression are information to be processed. Someone who’s high agency will not be scared to enter a new conversation. Whether they’re right or wrong, they fall back on foundational knowledge. They’ll take the new information, research it, and apply it as necessary and make formulations. They know their roots and why they believe them, back to first principles.
I call this the anti-signal because when someone is reluctant to entertain a viewpoint or rejects one automatically without solid explanation, it’s because they don’t trust themselves. This is a method of protection. Scared to be wrong, look dumb, or be manipulated. A non high agency trait.
This ability is rooted in a quiet confidence:
“You can’t manipulate me, but I’m interested in gaining knowledge.”
Absolute Pain Threshold
People who have endured pain in their life are dangerous because they know they can survive. Once your pain threshold has been pushed that high, the mere absence of pain starts to register as happiness — the same way a receding tide is as much a part of the ocean as the wave that crashes in. This means it takes less to make them happy. They can exist without “needing.” This low-energy happiness lets them exist in a space where they aren’t powered by dopamine.
Being powered by dopamine means you can’t resist the latest new items or new reality TV show. It pulls you away from the things that would improve your life, like financial freedom, but since you can’t resist, your autonomy is taken away. This has a short-term implication and a long-term implication. In the short term, you get a quick dopamine hit; in the long term, you get a stagnated financial future, which takes away your agency. You might think marrying into money solves this — the constant buying stops mattering once the money isn’t yours to run out. But agency was never about access to money, it’s about control of it. Even if you marry into money, there is still one person who controls it, and it’s not you.
The roots of this ability come from struggle and the confidence that you can survive it, because once before, that was the case.
Catlike Behavior
Inputs and outputs are at the core of psychological prowess. High agency people can detect subtle manipulation tactics and employ them. They’re aware of their weaknesses and strengths, and read others on the fly. This is an adaptable trait that allows them to exist anyplace they wish. Like a video game, you learn people and press their buttons in the correct order to get what you want. Tactics include things like loss aversion and anchoring. The tactics deployed will depend on whether the person is “good” or “bad.”
Without psychological prowess, you’re unaware that there are bad actors in the world — and what a bad actor looks like shifts depending on the world someone’s in and the perspective they carry. At the core, most people are selfish, but the strategies they employ are what make them different. Without awareness of these inputs and outputs, you’re another chess piece on the table. This doesn’t mean people are bad, but it means you’re at the will of others.
The root of this ability comes from intuition and awareness — yet another trait that was once leaned on for survival.
Personal Case
For the longest time I wore plain black shirts every day. Simple enough, but the reasoning was extensive. It meant I wasn’t paying a premium for a branded shirt, nor spending my hard-earned money to market someone else’s product.
Clothing companies get people to pay a premium to become walking billboards for their own brand — that’s the manipulation. People buy shirts for $50, then work their ass off in the gym to look good, then market that product for free. What do you get in return? Higher prices. So what did I do? I started wearing black shirts and built my own brand instead.
Without catlike behavior, I would’ve never caught the manipulation, let alone done something about it. If I didn’t have a high capacity for suffering, I wouldn’t have spent hours figuring out how to build my own thing, messing up many times along the way. Last but not least, if I didn’t have the confidence to wear my own product in public regardless of other opinions, none of it would’ve mattered. Instead, I put them up for sale — honestly didn’t care if anybody bought them, but if they did, that’d be cool too.
To Conclude
High agency individuals have freedom of mind. This doesn’t mean they’re always clear-headed and have no struggles — quite the opposite. They’ve just learned the dynamics of the world and learned to make the waves work for them instead of swimming in the riptide.
These people stand out like a lightbulb to each other in the world because there are so few. The reason there aren’t many is that it’s the hardest path to become truly yourself and not shut down in the face of anything you encounter.
It’s a high energy path many people choose not to take. Human nature wants to spend as little energy as possible for a joyful life. Companies spend billions of dollars to take advantage of that. The only question is: will you let them?