Maybe you’re not Actually Trying

On selective agency in capable people

Illustration by Alexander Naughton

Two things happened for me over the holidays five years ago: I went to rehab, and I acquired a cyberstalker. These were not entirely independent events. The stalker was someone in India who’d started following me when I was playing poker, who came to believe we had a close personal relationship and that my tweets were coded messages to him. When I stopped tweeting for two months, he became convinced something had happened to me, so he tracked down my email and phone number and started spamming me with messages demanding to know where I was.

By the time I realized this was happening, he’d already escalated to the point that I was clearly never going to respond. I started blocking him on different platforms, but he’d just create another account or phone number, or find some other way in. He messaged me dozens of times a day, alternating between threats and pleas. When he reached out to my company six months later to apply for a job, I learned his real name and used it to track down an old friend of his to ask for help — but the friend told me he was afraid to intervene because he didn’t want to become a target himself. I decided that there was nothing I could do from the other side of the world, and resigned myself to waiting him out.

Only he never tired. Years went by and I never responded, and still he messaged me multiple times a day. The messages became more disturbing, more pornographic, more violent. He told me he would come find me in Berkeley and hurt me. Finally, last November, in the span of a few days, he sent me an image of his brand new passport and a visa application, which he said he planned to use to travel here, and successfully extorted money from my brother by spoofing my phone number and pretending to have kidnapped me.

Enough! I thought, and snapped into action. Except that I didn’t. Instead, I curled up in a ball and cried, and told friends who suggested contacting the police that there was no point, that no one would be able to help as long as I was here and he was in India.

But my husband was insistent that there had to be a better answer, and asked me to let him intervene on my behalf. In short order, he was in contact with the FBI, the US consulate in India, and, with the help of his friend Govind, who has family there, the local police where the stalker lived. Within months, the situation had resolved, and he will never set foot on American soil.

One of the interesting things about all of this is that there was nothing particularly inventive about the strategies my husband deployed. They were more or less exactly the strategies I would have come up with if I’d been put in charge of a similar situation in someone else’s life. Why did it take another person getting involved for me to realize I wasn’t Actually Trying?

I think what happened is this: When the stalker entered my life, I was at a low point in personal capacity — broke, alone, addled, etc. My approach towards him at that point (ignore, hoping he’d stop) was the only one that seemed available given my spiritual and psychological resources at the time. But my orientation to the problem became fixed in time at that point of low agency, and it never occurred to me to revisit it as my capacity for action increased.

I think we are all like this. People are not just high-agency or low-agency in a global sense, across their entire lives. Instead, people are selectively agentic.

Let’s say that life is divided up into three theaters: work, relationships with others (all kinds) and relationship to self (physical health, introspection, emotional development, all of it). I think it’s the rule, rather than the exception, that people are stuck at an earlier stage of development in at least one area. There is one theater of life where they’re not Actually Trying — where they’re approaching serious problems with the resourcefulness of a teenager, though they are now capable adults.

In my particular corner of the world, there are tons of high-achievers in work. These are ingenious people shaping the world through innovations in science, technology, and policy. But many of them haven’t applied the same ingenuity to their interior experience or relationships. These are people who could successfully launch a product in a foreign country with little instruction, but who complain that there aren’t any fun people to meet on the dating apps.

It seems like, by default, you are stuck with whatever level of resourcefulness you brought to a problem the first time you encountered it and failed to fix it.

Let’s say you tried therapy when you were 20, and it didn’t help with your high levels of anxiety. When you think about your anxiety, as the years go by, you think, “hard problem, tried the main solution, didn’t work out.” Perhaps you just accept anxiety as a fixed trait, and your friends playfully rib you about it, which is nice but makes it seem even more like a static part of your identity. But you’re not 20 anymore. You’re, say, a 32-year-old CTO, and when a vital project at your startup doesn’t respond to your first approach, you vigorously try another, and another, trying to learn from every failure. That same persistence and curiosity don’t get applied to the anxiety that makes you suffer at work, though.

You don’t think, oh, I could probably:

• Check on my nutrition and sleep, in a serious way

• Look into supplements and medication

• Throw some resources at improving my rest and recovery

• Ask all of my friends about the best anxiety treatments they’ve ever heard of, or the best coaches/therapists they’ve ever worked with

• Research any emerging therapies designed for people like me

Instead of doing those things, you just put up with it. Or, worse, you fight through your anxiety using an earlier solution that required willpower, and the exertion of willpower makes you feel like you’re trying. But the feeling of effort doesn’t mean that you’re Actually Trying.

There is a relevant concept from Alexander Technique that I love, “faulty sensory appreciation,” which I learned about from Michael Ashcroft. The concept is that habitual tension distorts your sensory impressions—rigid stillness via bodily tension starts to feel like “good posture,” whereas relaxed uprightness feels strange, to the extent you might feel like your back is at a weird angle when you’re actually standing up tall. The right way feels like the wrong way. Apparently, this is demonstrated by having Alexander students lie in a position where your legs tell you that you shouldn’t be able to stand up — and then the instructor says, “by the way, you can stand up from here,” and you do.

Similarly, people who are being selectively agentic often have a kind of faulty sensory appreciation. Perhaps relationships feel hard for you, they take willpower, so it’s tempting to believe that you’re Actually Trying, that you’ve brought the full weight of your genius to bear on the problem. You might even take some pride in the struggle. Like rigid posture, the strain feels like correctness. But struggling is not evidence that you’ve tried everything. To the contrary, the continuous need for willpower may be the sign of a badly-engineered life.

I’d recommend assuming there’s some area of your life where you are, without realizing it, frozen in time, and that locating it matters quite a bit. Look across the three theaters of your life: work, relationships, and self-relationship, and take note of the biggest issues you face. Know that you might be looking for something that doesn’t feel like an issue — it might just feel like sadness or anger, like the sadness of not being seen, or the frustration of not feeling like your work is meaningful. Once you’ve surfaced something, ask yourself: Have I done my best to come up with a set of potential solutions, using all the resources I have? Am I doing as well by myself as I would by any friend who came to me with the same problem? How do I know I’m Actually Trying?

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