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? When asked what skills to develop in the...