Agency
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Tools. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
One challenge of living through a U.S. presidential election is confronting your own diluted agency. The atmospherics describe a contest of existential importance, and it is that, absolutely—but one in which any single one of us has, mathematically, almost no say. I believe in democratic self-government. But there are moments, among a citizenry of 337 million, when it might feel easier not to bother—not to experience the disjunction of making a choice that matters only in the invisible aggregate, way out there beyond you.
Some people reading this newsletter are happy about what happened on Election Day this year, or indifferent. Others are devastated and terrified, and with objectively good reason, since that was the stated intent of the winning candidate. (The cruelty is the point, as my former colleague Adam Serwer wrote indelibly.)
But wherever you land, I want to point out that a lot of us are attaching our sense of well-being to an event that we couldn’t individually control, either as voters or persuaders. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to persuade, to vote, to protest, and to stand up for one another. The American system is not designed to provide a transactional reward for civic participation for everyone every time—the founders had a sense of something called duty, which could sometimes take the place of personal benefit as an incentive to act—but it does rest on that participation. If we stop doing it then, yes, the system will break.
What it does mean is that these quadrennial contests of anger-slinging—and this will be hard for some people to hear, and it may sound like an abdication, but it isn’t; believe me, I feel the anger—may not be, in the domain of an individual life, the most meaningful or even effective place to invest all of this psychic energy. Putting it where it has, in essence, a 50-50 chance of yielding a negative return may in fact be part of what is so unsettling about where we are.
There’s a quality of electoral politics in America that’s kind of like signing up for an April marathon on New Year’s Day when you’ve never gone running. Your theory might be that with the race on the calendar, you’ll have no choice but to train and get in shape and compete. In the same way, we look to Election Day for a whole set of solutions. (“I’ll fix it,” Trump said.)
But that’s not how marathons work. You build toward them, from the smallest handful of miles. Pinning everything on a single date, the whole enterprise from 0 to 60, makes it likely instead that you’ll exhaust and disappoint yourself, or that you’ll resign to failure before you’ve begun. And in doing so you’ll make a tiny adjustment to that equation in you that determines whether you can take something on or not, whether you should try. Instead of running the marathon, you might end up with the belief that you can’t. That belief is false, and yet you’ve supplied it with its only evidence.
In the same way, some of us might come away from any given election with a sense of powerlessness. But maybe we were not in the right place to look for so much of our power.
Reality is a creative product. This newsletter isn’t about picking up a set of colored pencils so you can entertain yourself while the world burns, and it’s not about athletics as a distraction or a sublimation. It’s about the abiding truth that we are—principally, permanently—embodied creators, who have agency over the world we make with our bodies. It’s not just the agency of binary choice. It’s not just the agency of what to consume. It’s the agency to bring into being what isn’t here yet. Where that comes from is: the mystery that stands behind us, from which we arise, and that we may come to know with practice. Your ballot is way, way, way downstream from that. If that’s where all your agency is going, then most of what could have been possible is not going to work out.
Maybe you’re not sure what your creative acts might look like. But we all know how to reply to an email. So do me a favor: Reply to me now, and talk for a paragraph about something you hope you live to see—for you, for your kids, for me, whatever. Don’t overthink it. Don’t condition it on what feels possible at the moment. Write what comes to mind, while it comes, and then hit send.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram.