Agency and Introspection
Inertia — 216
There have been times this past year when I’ve sat back in my office chair after a particularly frustrating project, sighed, and asked myself, “Why do I keep agreeing to things like this?” Projects I had no passion for, with approaches I fundamentally disagreed with, yet I’d nodded along and committed to deliverables that would consume me.
I’d sit there and realise I didn’t even know what I did want—I’d remain so focused on being agreeable, on avoiding conflict, on meeting others’ expectations, that I dropped my internal compass entirely.
Each moment further crystallised my struggles with agency and its relationship with self-knowledge. For years, I left it conflated with assertiveness, the ability to get what you want or outcompete others. My mind described agency as being the loudest person in the room, bulldozing through obstacles, or having a knack for winning arguments. It’s that image of the “alpha” who takes charge, negotiates hard, and doesn’t back down. This is a very external-facing and reactive version of agency. Exerting force on the world around you. It measures success by whether you “won” in any given interaction.
The problem with this approach is that it leads you the wrong way and leaves you stuck in a mode of “assert and compete”, where you
Fight battles that don’t matter
Win arguments about things you don’t care about
Get what you thought you wanted
Spend enormous energy on competitions that pull you from your real goals
Make choices based on what looks impressive
Over-assertive agency can still be relatively passive; you’re still letting external circumstances dictate your responses, but you’re just responding with force rather than compliance. You’re not coming from a place of introspection or self-knowledge. True agency begins somewhere much quieter and more fundamental, starting with the painstaking work of mapping your interior. Understanding yourself well enough to know what you’re trying to achieve. Focusing on more collaboration, patience, walking away, or finding a different game altogether.
The cartography of self
I've come to understand agency as being less about power and more about precision in understanding yourself and your environment. One way to say it is about developing an accurate map of your interiority and a map of the external world, so you can navigate to situations where they overlap in generative ways.
It’s a reframing exercise, turning introspection from a zero-sum game into an exercise in cartography. Instead of asking "How can I win?" or "How can I get my way?", the questions become: "What do I value?", "What energizes me?", or "Where do my interests intersect with this opportunity?"
Good maps require both detail and perspective. You need to zoom in close enough to see the texture of your own motivations—the difference between what you think you should want and what actually moves you—while simultaneously zooming out and understanding the broader landscape of possibilities and constraints around you.
That’s agency.
This is where introspection becomes more essential, not as navel-gazing but as navigation. Without regular, honest self-examination, you end up operating from an outdated mindset. You chase goals that made sense five years ago. You react to fears that no longer make sense.
Introspection then becomes a form of agency itself. Self-reflection that updates your internal map, making your next choice slightly more informed, slightly more intentional. It's the difference between wandering and walking with purpose.
Beyond competition
Perhaps the best part of this is how it reframes competition. When agency is rooted in introspection, competitive situations become less about defeating others and more about finding a happy middle. Life can feel like magic when you aren’t forcing the world to accommodate you, nor contorting yourself to fit things that don’t matter. Agency, then, is not about becoming more forceful or more competitive. It’s about making choices from a deep well of self-understanding, saying yes and no with equal clarity, and finding ways to contribute that feel personally fulfilling and genuinely valuable to others. It’s creating your internal map (how you think, react, and spend energy) and navigating from there.