I’ve been feeling like I don’t have a choice in the way my life turns out. The mood of this feeling isn’t self-pitying (mostly, though we’ll get to that), more like, “how did I get here?”

An example: I don’t think I could have become a professor. After seeing what the job entails and doing the junior version of it (PhD) for ~5 years, I realized there’s no way I could do it.[^1] Some of my friends just naturally fall into the academic style of work; I don’t.

It feels about as built-in as height for a basketball player. Of course, I don’t mean to minimize all the great work they’ve done, much the same way not every 7' guy gets into the NBA. But I felt like I was about 5'10" trying to run with these guys. I had a couple advantages, I could dribble fast, and I developed a pretty good sense of who to pass to and when, and scored a few baskets. But when the NBA draft comes around, no way I’m going to get picked. Maybe, if I loved basketball 10x as much, or if I had a gun to my head and it’s basketball or death, I could have worked 10x as hard on my dribbling and passing, and made it into the NBA as the rare short guy.

That whole paragraph seems rather one-dimensional and self-pitying. I don’t feel that way. I feel like I just learned basketball isn’t my thing. I met the people who were 7' tall, and I met the people who thought “basketball or death”, and I realized that wasn’t me.

this has to be a balance, right

There’s upsides to feeling low-agency. If you feel yourself to be super-high-agency, like everything is your choice:

• everything bad will feel like your fault; no equanimity
• you’ll attempt crazy things assuming that “you can do anything if you put your mind to it” and then get really depressed when that isn’t true
• you’ll end up like a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” republican

But if you feel super-low-agency, like stuff just sort of happens to you:

• you won’t try hard enough
• you’ll feel small and hopeless
• well that’s a recipe for depression isn’t it

how is this showing up

Here are some things that I “chose”, that don’t feel like my choice:

• not being a professor
• moving from data science back into engineering
• still being a “solid engineer”, not a “all star company-leading expert kind of engineer”
• (redacted)
• (redacted)
• moving to Pittsburgh, given that we had a baby
• continuing to try to meditate, getting nowhere and banging my head against the wall, for so many years
• this trip I’m taking this weekend

I’m thinking it might be useful for me to develop more agency. (It feels pretty awful, like I’d be fighting uphill the whole way, but I can’t escape the fact that it sounds like the right answer.) I wonder how.