Dropping responsibilities
agentic /agen·tic/ adj 1 behaves like an agent: able to express or expressing agency or control on one's own behalf or on the behalf of another.
Merriam Webster
I believe that there are two types of people in the world: those who follow the path of fate, and those who craft their own destiny. For my whole life I've strived to be the latter, but feared that I was the former.
This truth explains a lot of parts of me. I did lots of things in High School for the sole purpose of trying to convince myself that I could control my life. Things that I thought I wouldn't do if I was just cruising along in the current of determinism. Reading Das Capitol. Running 36 miles. Skipping school for a week to write my college essays. Dedicating all my time to winning a national championship. Several other things that don't belong online.
But there was a limit to my action space in High School. There was only one path, with a clear goal: giving my 18 year old self as large an advantage as possible. No matter what I wanted to do in the long run, this was a pretty obvious way to optimize for every future path. This required that I kept certain responsibilities. I couldn't drop out of school, I couldn't quit rowing, I couldn't let my grades drop. And it was easy to convince myself to do it all. My 18 year old self would thank me.
In college, something changed. I had passed the set boundary that was graduation, and entered the great unknown that lay beyond. The optimization problem became infinitely more complex, and no longer knew what to aim for.
This was heightened by a deliberately short-sighted attitude over the summer. Over the summer, when people asked what I was thinking about college, I said I wasn't. I loved saying that the only thing I knew was that I had to step on a plane with my bags packed. As far as I was concerned, the things that existed on the other side of that plane were problems for an entirely different person.
This explains the catastrophe that was this last month.
You see, my post-plane self was somehow not the perfectly agentic being with a fully-fleshed out moral structure and clear life goals that I'd believed he would be. In fact, he was rather similar to my pre-plane self. So, I entered the rush that is the first quarter with no plans, and was dragged along by the streams of fate.
This shouldn't have been a big deal. I wasn't unhappy; in fact, I did very well. Rowing, relationships, dorm-life, friendships. I had a good schedule, and was keeping up with school. However, there was a voice in my head that wouldn't let that pass. I was happy, yes, but that's not what I wanted, right? If I had wanted to be happy, I wouldn't have come to MIT. I wanted to change the fucking world. Or something. And I wasn't getting any closer in my then situation. I was following the path of fate.
Realizing that the thing I feared most had managed to seep its way into my life, I lashed out, and did the only thing I felt like I could. Spurred on by my birthday, I quit my sport, left a relationship, transferred dorms, and made plans for a gap semester. All within a week.
I think it's still too recent to decide whether I think I would recommend this. I have not filled my new time as much as I'd hoped: it seems that it's easier to drop things than it is to add them. It's possible that, because dropping things felt like the only easy way to dramatically change my life, I made that choice as the lazy way out. It also has not been better for my overall, day-to-day happiness.
That said, I don't regret dropping. I'm optimistic that in the long run this will force me into a new path. That these pains are signs of growth, not just stupidity. That maybe, by dropping all of my responsibilities, I've created enough ripples to push myself in a new direction.
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First blog post yay? There are definitely some things I would change, but I told Misha it would be up by 4, and it's currently 3:38. I'm hoping that future posts won't be so broad and self-focused. However, since this has been the #1, 2, 3, and 4th most thought about thing recently, I felt like I couldn't start with anything else. I also want to add that none of these actions I took were for only the reasons listed above. They all had their own, individual complexities that I didn't have space (or reason) to share. That said, I hope this post serves as a partial explanation for some of the relatively weird things I've done over the last month.