What it means to be 'Agentic'
What it means to be 'Agentic'
It's more than self-control
Recently a lot of people have commented on my tendency to laud certain behaviors as “agentic,” and I’d like to explain more thoughtfully what exactly I mean by this.
On a surface level the word “agency” is basically synonymous with “self-control” or “free will,” and indicates one’s ability to act in accordance with his conscious desires. In that respect it tracks somewhat with low time preference—the ability to overcome short-term appetites in service of a greater long-term goal.
It’s perhaps ironic that under this definition I’m actually much less agentic than the average person; ever since I was a young child I’ve struggled with addiction and compulsive behavior, and I generally find it onerous to check my mail or pay my taxes.
And that’s actually a reason I fixate so much on agency: I start from the assumption that you can’t always control your own actions, and take it as axiomatic that the biggest driver of success in life is the ability to game around this reality. By surgically deploying agency at the macro level, one can modify his surrounding incentive structure to make it vastly easier for himself to exercise agency at the micro level.
Note this is how people overcome addictions or lose weight without getting fat again: they actively change their environment and dopaminic reward mechanisms. If you rely purely on “free will” to brute force your way to success you’ll inevitably fuck up the moment you have a bad day, which is why diets usually fail and junkies stay junkies.
And that brings me to the topic of today’s essay: a far subtler dimension of agency tragically ignored by the shrinks and life coaches who write about the topic.
I’m proud to say I’m tremendously strong in this other sort of agency. And thank God for that, because if I weren’t my deficit in the more traditional sort would likely see me shooting meth in a trailer park instead of slamming addy in a high rise.
So what is this other dimension? In essence it’s your capacity to rewrite the script of life.
It’s your ability to proactively exploit shortcuts, loopholes, and exponential strategies.
It’s the extent to which you can jam a crowbar into the hinges of reality and crack open vaults most people don’t even know about to secure a wildly asymmetric return.
I was not a happy child.
One reason for this is I never fit in among my extended family; growing up I spent an unusual amount of time (at least for a white American) with my cousins and aunts and uncles, and this was always a deeply unpleasant experience.
I was never molested or anything; I just clashed with them constantly about dumb shit. I was a black sheep pretty much from the moment I developed a personality, and stayed that way until I had the resources to move across the country and sever ties.
Looking back some of my difficulties can be attributed to disagreeableness or autism, but it’s clear to me now that social class played an equally large role.
Both of my parents were professionals with an elite education, but they came from working class backgrounds, and in different ways retained the blue collar values of their youth. For her part, my mother cherished proximity to family, so shortly after marrying they relocated to Arizona to live near her people: a close-knit clan of fantastically trashy and dysfunctional Borderers.
Much like JD Vance’s family in Hillbilly Elegy, my kinfolk were never really “poor” in terms of income, and neither were they stupid. They were just horribly unagentic and prone to making cartoonishly terrible decisions. But most of them were clearly high IQ, and could have made something of themselves with just a bit more self-discipline.
For instance, one of my girl cousins did well enough in school to win a full ride to Brown… only to get impregnated shortly before graduating and wind up a single mom.
Another family member was briefly a successful contractor, but he got hooked on opiates and ended up ballooning to Snorlax levels of obesity.
This was a recurring pattern—everyone was smart enough to tread water, but never disciplined enough to consolidate their forces or accumulate a lasting surplus. Over the long term this resulted in chaotic and ugly lives of decently comfortable squalor.
That characterization sounds rather hateful, so allow me to note for the record that I don’t see myself as any better than my family. How could I, when I myself am guilty of all the same hilariously Scotch-Irish vices? I burn bridges over trivial matters of personal honor, spend money like a drunken sailor, am hooked on pills, and am constantly pursuing short-lived affairs with emotionally unstable women.
At any reunion I’d have a decent shot at winning White Trash Bingo.
No—I’ve merely enjoyed superior life outcomes, which I attribute to three factors:
The first is I can mask somewhat convincingly as “culturally upper middle class.” Unlike my cousins I was raised to value art and education in a substantive way instead of as a cargo cult, and for an autiste I have a decent understanding of etiquette norms. Meanwhile my parents never once raised their voices at each other, and even when they split it was almost comically amicable. Because of this I’ve always understood how to communicate professionally and navigate the halls of power.
The second factor is that I’ve become quite rich, and that has a way of absorbing the worst consequences of white trash behavior. In a lot of situations you can simply pay to make the problem go away, which is why rich guys frequently engage in the same high risk behaviors as the lower orders, much to the chagrin of the finger-wagging, hot dog-munching, Dave Ramsey-enjoying middle classes.
The third factor is that I simply have a much higher IQ than any of them. And yes, I understand that’s a ferociously shit-eating thing to say. But it’s actually quite salient here, because there are lots of exponential strategies I was able to employ that were never available to my family. That’s a very big deal, because trashy people are as a rule quite lazy and always looking for ways to bypass obstacles and get rich quick.
Sometimes this works, in which case you actually become rich and generally aren’t seen as trashy anymore (except maybe by pretentious old money types who live in their mom’s vacation house). This is what I was fortunate enough to experience with job stacking, and lots of other guys achieve the same thing through real estate or ventures like selling overpriced solar panels to black people.
More often it doesn’t work—usually for basic market efficiency reasons: if you actually could get rich quick through these ventures, why doesn’t everyone pursue them?
Note with job stacking the answer to this is very easy: most people are pussies and scared of getting in trouble, and it requires you to be legitimately skilled at your job. With any hustle that’s actually lucrative you will always see some such combination of perceived risk and a genuine resource constraint.
But you never see that in flat-out scams like MLM; they basically just offer post-scarcity, and that’s precisely what makes them so attractive to lazy and delusional Xanax Aunts (including half the women in my family).
But I’m getting far ahead of myself, and don’t want you walking away with the impression that I think I’m some hypercompetent machiavellian ubermensch.
To the contrary, I’ve always relied upon exponential life strategies mostly to compensate for my own shortcomings and sort of “merge into traffic” with peers.
Understand that for the first half of my life I was the most contemptible sort of loser imaginable—I weighed over 300 lbs, looked like a Portuguese lesbian, and was generally a C student because I much never did my homework.
I was also a weird fuck who did lots of obnoxious shit, so I was bullied pretty much nonstop and got into lots of fights. That sent my adolescent mind to some pretty horrific places, and let’s just say there’s probably a universe where I have a fairly unflattering Wikipedia entry. But there was a definite silver lining to this misery in that it got me very accustomed to proactively seeking out alternate life strategies.
For instance, I was grotesquely obese in middle school, and P.E. was an absolute nightmare for me. I really wanted a way of escaping it for high school. After a bit of research I discovered exactly that in an online P.E. course offered at a nearby charter.
Yeah you heard that right—online P.E.
The way it worked was you were supposed to document the exercises you did and your parents would sign off on it, but I just lied and told my parents I was doing jumping jacks or some shit when I was actually arguing about Austrian economics on 4chan. Of course they probably knew I was lying, but they also probably knew that making me run laps at a public school might potentially result in a Wikipedia article.
And so I got my way.
I observed for the first time—though certainly not the last—that in most situations there’s nothing really stopping you from ignoring “the rules,” diverging from the standard script, and imposing your Will to Power on the world. You simply need to be clever and persistent and willing to iterate, and in the end you’ll often prevail.
Now, this doesn’t mean others will *respect* your path to victory—in most cases they won’t, either because of personal animosity or pigheadedness or plain old sour grapes. But neither are you obliged to respect their path of obedient and gay mediocrity. All that matters is you got what you wanted, and if people resent you for that fuck them.
I took this attitude to its logical conclusion in the following semester by dropping out of high school and enrolling in a self-paced fully remote program that catered mostly to teen moms and anchor babies fresh out of juvie. My mom insisted on me also taking an in-person philosophy class at the local community college, but other than that I was entirely unsupervised and free to spend my time however I wished.
Naturally I pounced on this opportunity and decided to speedrun high school.
Since most of my classmates were minorities the coursework was laughably easy, and by putting in a solid grind over subsequent months (and also cheating aggressively) I was able to finish all of the program’s curriculum in a single semester, ultimately ending up as the valedictorian of my class.
This wasn’t an especially impressive feat, mind you—several of my peers were ejected from the graduation ceremony for repeatedly throwing gang signs, and all of them clearly had room temperature IQs. But nobody needed to know that.
And ultimately no one ever did—I started college at fourteen without the slightest hitch, and for the rest of my academic career whenever someone asked about my high school they always assumed it was an innovative Montessori thing for gifted kids instead of a bizarre institutional cushion for pregnant black girls. Once more I had skipped the line completely without consequence, and for a while everyone treated me like Jimmy Neutron even though I’d gotten there mostly by cheating.
Of course, I was the only one who knew this—to everyone else my achievements were 100% real. And in that sense, perhaps they actually were. There’s no denying I pulled off something genuinely impressive for a fourteen year-old in scamming the system and having everyone suck my cock for it.
Also let’s be real here—it’s not like there’s anything even remotely important about high school busywork. I merely discovered the optimal way to bypass a few of life’s most annoying obstacles and cut to the front of the line without having to eat shit. And having done this I was still a lot more educated than most 18 year-olds who graduate from a public school after doing the work, because the time I saved via cheating was mostly spent learning economics and philosophy through self-study.
So I don’t regret what I did—not one whit. I’d do it again with gusto and help any kid in that situation do the same. Because honestly fuck normies, fuck ankle-biting chuds, fuck rule-following Lisa Simpson types, and fuck hectoring schoolmarms.
You need to step on the gas pedal and take what’s yours.
The next few years were among the best of my life. Being surrounded by a vastly more mature peer group gave me space to breathe socially and helped me become less awkward and maladjusted, and by the time I turned eighteen and graduated with my first degree I was mostly capable of masking my autism and not acting like a freak.
But my last year of undergrad was bittersweet. I wasn’t Doogie Howser anymore, and could no longer coast on being The Kid. I was also really wanting a girlfriend at that point, and despite having lost most of the weight in the preceding years proved horribly unsuccessful in my attempts at asking out Freshmen girls my own age.
This naturally filled me with a tremendous amount of incel rage, as I’d always assumed that getting a girlfriend would be completely trivial the moment I became physically attractive, and by that point I was easily a hard 7. It didn’t make sense—what the hell did these stupid roasties want from me?
Thankfully I didn’t have much time to dwell on that question, because in the months that followed I graduated as an unemployable philosophy major, and that meant I was no longer just an incel—I was an incel NEET.
Or not a NEET exactly—I actually made pretty decent money for most of that year writing papers for rich Arab and Chinese kids. Looking back I honestly could have scaled this into a very respectable business had my attitude toward the world been a little less soy. I kick myself now for never thinking of this. But ultimately I was still a kid and incredibly insecure about my lack of status in any elite institution, which honestly makes a lot of sense when you consider my situation at the time.
For one thing, my parents had attended a near-Ivy while I had gone to Arizona State, and this made me feel like a downwardly mobile loser who needed to prove himself.
More importantly, when I first chose philosophy as a major my parents made around $350k joint and I was planning on going into academia because lol fuck money. But by the time I graduated my mom had suffered a nervous breakdown and quit her job, while my dad had changed careers entirely, meaning their joint income had plunged into the mid five figures and suddenly I couldn’t order guacamole at Chipotle anymore.
Suffice it to say that really sucked. People who say “money doesn’t matter” are always the ones who haven’t been both rich and poor. But those of us who’ve swum in both pools understand that money matters—it matters a lot.
And that’s ultimately what drove an incorrigible wordcel like me to return to school for a second degree in STEM. Over the next few years I gradually and deliberately built my career as a knowledge worker while very dutifully pursuing my credentials.
During this epoch I never felt any impetus to pursue exponential strategies like job stacking to make more money, and honestly was dissociating easily 70% of the time. But that’s mostly because I was employing those same strategies in a separate domain: becoming an internet celebrity as part of the 2015-2017 Alt Right.
I’ve already written about the numerous ways in which the Alt Right helped me self-actualize. But to make a long story short, my brief stint as an eceleb was the first time in my life that I’d held any sort of widely-acknowledged status or leadership position, and in practice this served as an enormous injection of confidence and social capital that ultimately improved my life in more ways than I can count.
In a few months I made dozens of friends who could think and debate at my level—something I never encountered even once at either Arizona State or any of my bug jobs in the years I was deplatformed. It wasn’t until I came to Substack this year that I recalled how incredibly liberating it feels to have access to so many enormous brains.
I also used my newfound celebrity to escape inceldom, shamelessly employing my racist Disney parodies to casting couch a statuesque aryan e-girl fantastically out my league before immediately claiming her as my first girlfriend.
Zero regrets.
Had Leibniz been right 2016 would have lasted forever. But all must pass, and my first run as Walt Bismarck ultimately proved just as short-lived as my Doogie Howser Era.
In 2017 I was permabanned from Twitter, while the following year saw the destruction of my enormous YouTube channel, which boasted tens of thousands of subscribers and even then stood as one of the largest platforms in the wider Alt Right ecosystem
The years that followed were the most miserable of my life. This was around the same time that I embarked upon my notorious quest to forge a Hyperborean ethnostate in Omaha, and as I wrote in that infamous essay, it wasn’t long before I’d grown utterly disenchanted with Trump and WN and Nebraska and homeschooled trad girls.
And as I lost my exuberance for these things, I increasingly found myself dominated by a sort of hatred and dissociated malaise I hadn’t experienced since high school.
The ironic thing is that by this point my life was superficially better than ever: I was finally credentialled and making six figures, and no longer found it especially difficult to pull women. But this improvement was entirely shallow, as it had come mostly at the expense of my youthful enthusiasm and ability to actually enjoy my success.
I’d only secured a dignified salary upon realizing there’s no such thing as honest labor anymore and deciding that the only way to negotiate with a boss is constant hardball. But this change in mindset also made it impossible to enjoy my work, which now seemed an innately adversarial enterprise in which trying hard is a cuck move.
Much the same thing happened with women—it was only after getting humiliated in a rather sadistic way by a girl I’d been pedestalizing (one which under my heuristics at the time should have been extraordinarily unlikely to do such a thing) that I grew the fangs necessary to handle relationships with women in a consistently masculine way. But this experience also sort of ruined women for me, as the opportunity for pedestalization had always been one of the things I most enjoyed about them!
All in all a pretty blackpilling situation. But thankfully the story doesn’t end here.
In 2020 I returned to Florida and left everything Midwestern behind me for good.
With this move I also jettisoned any lingering pretense of “trad” values, committing with gusto to defining my own life script and resolving to forcefully dismiss all future attempts by other men to impose on me their personal sense of right and wrong.
In effect the goal became to erect a fortified citadel for myself that minimized any obligation to submit to external power structures, while maximizing my own ability to assert my values as sovereign and absolute within the confines of this citadel.
To that end I immediately began a steroid cycle (nothing too crazy—just 300m test e) and started taking amphetamines to help me put in the hours necessary for my incredibly demanding new managerial role at Deloitte.
I also started eschewing all conventional dating platforms, and began meeting women exclusively through Seeking Arrangement.