Pursuing Agency and Reinvention in My 30's

It turns out I was barely trying before

I'm 34 years old. About the age where you can no longer hide behind the fact that you have plenty of time to grow up and become the person you want to be. It's also not so far into middle age that your efforts in changing can't take root and produce fruit. At least, that's the hope that drives me.

Let me start with a challenging observation. I'm less successful than I hoped to be by now. The gap is significant. I've always considered myself someone with lots of potential, but over the past couple of years, that identity has been hard to maintain. I have friends who are going to be 40, and to me, that doesn't sound young anymore. There's only so long you can go on talking about your potential. You need to produce at some point, and so far, I haven't.

In search of a new identity

I now think of myself as an underachiever. After dozens and, more likely, hundreds of attempts at changing my path, I feel stuck. I've lost confidence in myself and feel more restless than ever. A change must happen soon, or I worry my personality will be warped permanently by frustration.

That brings me to my reason for this post: to put a stake in the ground and begin an earnest project of shaking off my complacency and becoming a high-agency person. 

I spent weeks staring into the abyss, as I am prone to do, but something different came out of my thoughts this time. Something that felt raw and honest and pointed. I had been making plans all this time, but was I trying to change, or was I waiting for a lucky break or pacifying myself? The answer is clear. I was barely trying. 

The only thing worse

I could accept reality and come to peace with my trajectory. That would be easier than my constant dissatisfaction from failed expectations. And it would spare me the struggle of trying and failing repeatedly.

But the only thing I can imagine worse than my current discouragement would be the boredom that grows out of complacency. The only way for me is forward. The rewards I seek are the journey itself, a renewed sense of progress, and putting a dent in the world.

Why I'm discouraged

My frustration is not the result of physical suffering, material want, or any big mistakes I've made. It's the deep ache of not having enough agency to shape your life in your desired direction. It's having an active mind with big dreams but pulled in a hundred directions and left standing right where you started. It's promises to yourself that you don't keep and a will to act that doesn't match your ambitions.

I'm unhappy with the non-productive person I've become. Here are the traits and aspects of my life that I find most frustrating:

Trouble regulating emotions

• I'm easily overwhelmed or discouraged.

  • Looking at an extensive task list gives me a feeling of dread.

  • I'm easily frustrated with myself if something takes longer than I think it should.

• I'm more motivated to remove destructive emotions than to accomplish things.

  • I wait until a sense of impending doom drives me to action.

  • When the pain is relieved, I leave my foot off the gas again.

• I prefer to get lost in my thoughts rather than engage in reality.

  • I can spend multiple hours thinking of plans and dreaming about the future.

  • But ask me to write those thoughts down; it feels like work.

• I'm quick to give in to distraction.

  • I don't want to know how much time I've spent surfing the internet when I should have been working.

  • I feel myself reaching for distraction at the first sign of boredom or uncertainty.

• I'm afraid of trying and failing.

  • The pain of wasting time trying is more acute than avoiding it.

  • It's more about the fear of wasted effort than of being wrong.

• I'm awful at delaying gratification.

  • I'm sure I would have failed the marshmallow test as a child

  • I've gravitated towards activities with quicker payoffs and away from anything that takes a while to be rewarding.

Complacency

• I'm not the patient and thoughtful father I want to be.

  • I can be overly direct and forceful with my words when my kids aren't following directions.

  • I'm putting in the minimum effort to feel like a decent parent, but no more.

• I'm habitually lazy and seek the path of least resistance.

  • I have spent many days doing virtually nothing, and I mean nothing.

  • If there were an Olympic sport for browsing the internet, thinking about my life, and making plans, I would have Lebron James status.

• I stopped investing in spiritual growth.

  • Christianity is a big part of my baseline worldview, but I've made minimal effort to dig deeper and grow in my faith.

  • The problem is it doesn't hurt to ignore, and so I do

• I've slipped in taking care of my health.

  • I've put on 10-15 pounds in the past two years.

  • I stopped exercising except for a daily walk and have begun snacking to comfort complex emotional states.

• I'm always looking for shortcuts because I feel behind.

  • My life is lived in an eternal state of now.

  • I'll spend a year reading about life hacks for making money every day, but I won't do the freelance work I could easily take up.

• I don't think deeply, and I lack cognitive stamina.

  • My brain now operates a mile wide but an inch deep, preferring to glance off the surface of topics rather than go deep.

  • I stopped reading books and now resort to skimming articles for quick dopamine hits.

• I need to grow our family's income more.

  • I stupidly assumed I would stumble on an easy path to riches.

  • Our needs are met, but there are tougher tradeoffs ahead if things stay the same.

Poor executive function

• I'm indecisive and overly introspective.

  • Instead of thinking and weighing options, I let them stew vaguely in my mind.

  • I have difficulty committing to an idea because I assume I don't know enough.

• I'm an overplanner who hates uncertainty.

  • Planning is instantly rewarding for the effort involved, so I love it.

  • The real world feels messy and uncertain, and so I hate it in comparison.

• I don't take simple ideas seriously enough.

  • Complexity is fun and makes you look smart, but while doing it, it is boring and feels like work.

  • I secretly wish to learn everything through a book and then pay someone else to do it.

• I don't have any direction in my career.

  • I have a remote job with people I like but feel restless.

  • I don't have a mission with my professional life, just vague notions of topics that seem attractive when you read about them at a high level.

  • I don't have many skills or experience that might make for a quick transition.

• I've grown too cynical for sustained action.

  • I talk myself out of so many ideas because "they'll never work," even though I can point to many people doing them already.

  • There's always some excuse: I'm too late, what they're doing could be more impressive, I need to gain the skills, it would take too long, etc.

The result is that I'm 34 years old and struggling with the same things I struggled with at age 18. I coasted and floundered through a crucial decade and a half of my life and now have very little to show for my time. It was easy to fool myself into believing that reading about ambitious people would spur me to action and that my distraction was just unchanneled passion waiting for a muse. The truth is that I became lazy, emotionally immature, and complacent. What feels like a complex emotional life is embarrassingly simple: I dream a big game, but I'm unwilling to follow through.

What's good in my life

It would be unbalanced if I didn't share what's gone well with my life and some things that make me proud. I've been married for almost 14 years and have a very happy and emotionally close relationship with my wife. We're raising four young children under nine years old, and despite my shortcomings, they like being around me. I'm intelligent and quick at learning things if I set my mind to it. I ran a mile in 4 minutes and 43 seconds back in college, which won't win awards, but it sounds fast. For most of my life, I've had abs. And finally, I've always had at least one super close male friendship and a group of guy friends where I felt I belonged.

Even writing that paragraph makes me feel better about things. The truth is that my life isn't a disaster. I'm socially satisfied and decent, but I have very little agency. And that's the part I want to change. 

What I've learned about change 

Change is hard. I have tried and failed many times to change the traits about myself that I mentioned above. I also can't think of a person in my life, or even I've read about, who drastically changed along those lines. The possible exception would be an emotionally immature teenager who eventually got their act together. But in adulthood? No. I've never seen it.

But hard is not impossible, and if there's one thing I am, it's optimistic. Here are some tips for myself that I want to apply in this process:

• Introspection only gets you so far. If meta-level thinking about my lack of motivation helped, I would be cured. I'm in the 99th percentile of time spent.

• More than willpower is needed. The days are too long, and so are the weeks if all I'm doing is grinding it out. I will come to resent my efforts and rebel.

• Progress is the best motivation. The key to success is compounding. If I can get myself in a positive feedback loop and stay there, great things can happen.

• Find a way to enjoy the journey. Related to the point above. I need to find a way to make life into a game that I enjoy playing and feel progress.

• I need to keep promises to myself. This is the foundation of personal agency. Knowing that you'll do what you say you'll do. I'll need to start small and rebuild trust with myself.

• I need positive peer pressure. Right now I feel like a man on an island. What I need is the camaraderie and energy of wanting to impress others.

My ideal self

Now, I'll paint a picture of the life I want. Here are the specific ways I want to improve over the next 12 months.

Grow in patience and gratitude. Patience is the virtue I most admire in parents of young children. And gratitude is the trait I find most conducive to a better world.

• Demonstrate empathy and intentionality towards my kids when they don't listen well.

• I want to be more supportive of my wife instead of offering her suggestions for improvement.

• Remember to think about all the little things I love about being part of a family.

Increase my family's income above breakeven. We are a one-income family. My job pays the bills, and we have a little left over for fun, but I need more to save money. Thankfully, we have a decent emergency fund/savings of $35,000 to prevent immediate stress. But with four young children and many dreams of adventure, this situation needs to change, or it will lead to some tough trade-offs ahead.

• Write two freelance articles a week

• Grow the size of my blog audience through SEO and further monetize

• Pursue opportunities with two friends (details to come)

Add depth to my faith. I'm intellectually committed to the tenets of Christianity but need to gain more zeal. I want to recover this lost zeal for the richness it will add to my life and the marginal spillover benefits for society.

• Study the 100 best stories of the Bible

• Memorize these stories with flashcards

Become a better thinker. I pride myself on being a pretty smart guy, but my thinking has become lazy and shallow. I want to apply some intentionality to this area of my life to build a better foundation and someday contribute as a thinker/writer. The last part is essential to me but, as of yet, undefined.

• I want to give myself a liberal arts education with books (more to come on this)

• Choose 4-5 intelligent writers to follow online

• Make writing a daily habit

Quadruple my contribution at my day job. I'm embarrassed by how much I've coasted in my career. Since moving fully remote after the pandemic, I've felt disconnected and have lacked motivation.. 4x might seem crazy, but not if you saw the baseline I'm working from.

• Manifest determination to make things happen

• Put in more focused hours per day (currently very low)

Get my abs back. This feels superficial to write, but I've always had abs, and that’s a small part of my identity that I like. They are still there, but only barely. Bringing them back will feel like a triumph and boost confidence, even if no one else sees them.

• Run 1 mile a day

• No snacks after dinner

• Daily weigh-in

Have fun again. Over the past decade, my malaise has caused me to lose enjoyment of things I once enjoyed. Having an outlet for fun that has no utility is healthy for me. My wife and I recently watched the NASCAR documentary on Netflix, and she's now interested in following the sport, particularly the driver stories. I also enjoy that this exposes me to a part of American culture that’s not my own.

• Start following NASCAR again

• Travel more (I’ll share an exciting idea in the future)

What's next

The most vivid storyline of my inner life has been a struggle with low agency, low energy, and complacency. I've spun my wheels for years trying to find a path out. But now, at the age of 34, I feel a massive sense of urgency to change. I have an idea of myself that I feel compelled to live up to, and the excuses have run out.

One piece of writing that inspired me to finally take this project seriously is Cate Hall's How to be More Agentic. One of her core pieces of advice is to "assume everything is learnable." The suggestion made me realize that I have long felt certain traits about myself were fixed. After living for over a decade without those traits, can you turn yourself into a high-energy, highly agentic person? I used to assume not. But I now realize that idea was a self-fulfilling prophecy keeping me stuck in place. What if the world is more malleable than I thought? That's the new mindset I'm adopting for this project. I can learn anything with enough practice and persistence.

Besides my transformation, one larger goal for recording this journey is to document my path and share what I have learned. Like anyone who struggles with something, I have long been obsessed with these topics. Starting with this intense case study of one, I dream of expanding outward and studying more about these traits in other people's lives and exploring some of the open questions around them. But today is day one, and the change must start with me.

In future articles, I will flesh out the details behind my vision of an ideal self in each area. I'll also document the actions I'm taking and how it works. Lastly, I want to think more deeply about what caused me to fall into the unhelpful patterns of thought that took root in my life and what I can do to create new pathways. Thanks for following along.