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Everyone wants to be ‘high agency’ now

It may be a guise for a gambler’s ethos.

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“High agency” is now being branded as a personality trait.

“High agency” is now being branded as a personality trait.

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: PIXABAY

Sophie Haigney

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I first noticed the phrase when it cropped up in conversations among my friends, as a dichotomy: Were we “high agency” or “low agency”?

Intuitively, I had a sense of what that meant, and which side of that divide I should want to be on. Was inertia or timidity keeping us in a city, a job or a relationship? Or were we the captains of the ships of our own lives, thinking about career pivots, trying out vibe-coding, remembering that we could move to the desert and start a whole new life?

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