A Passive Age
I’ve long been an advocate of agency—namely, digging deep despite challenges and suffering and choosing, as much as is in our power, the things that can make our life better. Or, in the wise perspective of Jordan Peterson, at least make it less bad.
This is a significant antidote to the suffering so prevalent in our modern, gadget-dictated lives. Our days, filled with lights and sound but little meaning unless intentionally injected in, easily drift toward malaise.
Agency—especially according to the Aristotelian template, which aligns remarkably well with modern neurobiological discovery and the brain’s capacity for rewiring—is the way we renounce the spirit of this age of distraction and reaffirm ourselves as masters of our destiny in a meaningful sense. This, of course, does not have to rule out a divine power also active in our lives, but does point to the tremendous dignity of what it is to be a body-soul human composite.
The Dignity of Human Action
I come by my conviction about agency fairly, having dealt with both incredible opportunities and devastating disappointments.
It is in and through hard work and uncommon choices that I was ready with an album when I met the record label, that I was able to pursue a rigorous classical education in Europe, and that I’ve been able to build a life in Los Angeles as a singer and writer despite many contradictions along the way.
It is also through a similar commitment to doing whatever I could within my power that I have been able to navigate chronic illness over the years, as well as the many trials that come with every human life.
The incredible power of the digital black hole sucking us all in requires only more and more heroism by the day. Instead of cowering in response, or resignedly giving in to the limp offering for our lives via a reduced technological existence, we can be the bright, shining ones who choose otherwise: meaningful leisure, sincere friendship, real love, good food, movement in the sun, and engagement with and presence in reality.
The Brain Rewires Around What We Repeatedly Choose
I recently read that there is a correlation between doing things we don’t really want to do and a portion of the brain that grows larger in response to these choices. Ultimately, people are surmising that this increase in the strength of the will aligns with the fundamental will to live.
We are bombarded daily by so many things that want our attention, but for the sake of life, we must reconnect with our capacity for agency and not leave ourselves at the mercy of those with a greater will for our lives than ourselves.
Grace, Habit, and the Fight for Real Life
I am a person of faith, and although I’ve seen some people make firm choices against the stream, fighting with all the strength of salmon in mating season, most of us need the strength beyond our own that comes from God in order to break the unhealthy patterns, so common now, that bind us.
Aristotle speaks of the need for pattern disruption, from his conception of human action hardening into the deep trenches of habit, and for most people, this requires something fairly dramatic.
I believe grace fills that gap when we ask for it, and I share this not from a proselytizing perspective so much as a sincere desire, in the natural, for people to be set free from the confines of our digital modern prisons into real life, where laughter and joy can abound and we can become the fullest versions of ourselves in tru human flourishing.
So, to whatever extent you are someone who prays: pray. Pray for the grace to sustain the constant pattern disruption required to live well in an often limiting modern time, and choose with all the firmness of your will to be human and to fight for what truly matters.
From Flicker to Flame
Beautifully, however this pattern disruption happens, our nature begins to serve us rather than hinder us. Our brains rewire quite remarkably around new choices, and eventually these become entrenched habits.
Those new habits can form the bedrock of an entirely different life—one that can run counter to the misery so common to our age.
From this place of sincere agency, no matter how frail it begins, you will find the flicker of a new fire.
From that flicker, imagine the blaze that can grow.
KAY CLARITY ARCHIVE 