reactive agency - by Claire Wang - cold brew blog

You stay up until 2 am scrolling reels you don't care about because it feels like rebellion against your should-go-to-bed self, telling yourself “I deserve to relax after this shitty day.” The college kid skips class for months and posts about it like an achievement, a proud transgression. Both of you think you're being autonomous. You're not. This is what I call reactive agency, where you feel agentic because you’re Making Choices™, but all your choices are just responses to external structure rather than internally generated goals. Maybe it feels satisfying because breaking rules give you immediate feedback and clear metrics (did I get caught? did I get away with it?). The college student is not actually choosing what they want to learn or do. Instead, they’re defining their actions by the breaking of a rule vs. what they actually spent that skipped class time doing instead. The reward is inherent in the rule-breaking. A different way to put it is that people tend to act as if there

You stay up until 2 am scrolling reels you don't care about because it feels like rebellion against your should-go-to-bed self, telling yourself “I deserve to relax after this shitty day.” The college kid skips class for months and posts about it like an achievement, a proud transgression. Both of you think you're being autonomous. You're not. This is what I call reactive agency, where you feel agentic because you’re Making Choices™, but all your choices are just responses to external structure rather than internally generated goals. Maybe it feels satisfying because breaking rules give you im