In a cultural landscape often obsessed with hustle culture and aggressive ambition, Henrik Karlsson offers a startlingly gentle counter-narrative: true agency is not about force, but about attunement. While many define the ability to shape one's destiny as a hard-edged, Type-A trait, Karlsson argues that the most effective agents are those who can feel out the details of reality and find the path of least resistance. This distinction is vital for anyone feeling paralyzed by the modern world's complexity, offering a roadmap that prioritizes clarity of purpose over brute force.
Redefining the Drive
Karlsson begins by dismantling the popular, often toxic, interpretation of "high agency." He posits that agency is not merely about grinding through obstacles but is actually an amalgamation of two distinct mental dispositions: autonomy and efficacy. "Agency, as I see it, is an amalgamation of two skills, or mental dispositions: autonomy and efficacy," he writes. This framing is crucial because it separates the what (autonomous goals) from the how (effective action). Without the former, one is just busy; without the latter, one is just dreaming.
The author suggests that the opposite of agency is not laziness, but rather a passive adherence to social scripts or a premature assumption that problems are unsolvable. "Or phrased negatively, the opposite of agency can mean one of two things. Either (1) doing what you are 'supposed to do,' playing social games that do not align with what, on reflection, seems valuable to you and/or (2) being passive or ineffective in the face of problems," Karlsson explains. This is a powerful diagnostic tool for the reader. It shifts the blame from a lack of willpower to a lack of imagination or a failure to question defaults. The argument lands effectively because it reframes "failure" not as a character flaw, but as a cognitive error in mapping the solution space.
Agency is often framed as a hard-edged, type-A, aggressive approach. But over the last year, as I've been thinking about writing this essay, I've talked to a lot of highly agentic people, and I've read biographies about and interviews with people whose agency I admire and . . . hard-edged does not fit what I've seen.
The Solvability of Problems
To illustrate his point, Karlsson turns to the life of German filmmaker Werner Herzog, using him as a case study for the belief that "problems are solvable." The author recounts how Herzog, as a teenager, realized that the barrier to making films wasn't a lack of permission, but a lack of imagination regarding the solution. When producers mocked the young Herzog, calling him a child from a "kindergarten," he didn't retreat. Instead, he treated the rejection as data. "The entire encounter lasted fifteen seconds, after which I turned and left the office, knowing full well I would have to become my own producer," Karlsson notes.
This anecdote highlights a critical component of agency: the willingness to bypass broken systems. Karlsson contrasts Herzog's direct action with his own hesitation when he wanted to write essays, believing that "No one has ever made a living as an essayist" was an immutable law of nature. "I was sure I knew which problems were solvable and which weren't—it is almost arrogant if you think about it," he admits. This self-reflection adds a layer of humility to the piece. It suggests that the barrier to agency is often our own rigid mental models, not the external world.
Critics might argue that this approach romanticizes the struggle of the individual against the system, ignoring that not everyone has the safety net or resources to fund their own film production or write essays without a salary. However, Karlsson anticipates this by emphasizing that the solution doesn't have to be grand. He points to composer Philip Glass, who funded his music by working in a plumbing business, and Herzog, who worked the night shift at a steel factory. The lesson isn't that everyone must work in a slaughterhouse, but that one must be willing to "roll up your sleeves and work as a bouncer in a sex club or a warden in a lunatic asylum" if that is the shortest path to the goal.
Unbundling the Goal
The most practical insight in the piece is the concept of "bundled" thinking. Karlsson argues that people often fail because they conflate the core value they seek with a specific, often arbitrary, method of achieving it. He realized he had conflated "being a writer" with "having a publisher" and "getting a salary from my writing." "These are not the same thing," he asserts. By unbundling these concepts, he saw that the actual goal was "thinking on the page," which could be achieved through various means, including a day job to fund the writing.
This clarity allows for what Karlsson calls "simple solutions." He cites the example of a group on a Discord server that solved a massive bureaucratic failure in California's vaccine distribution. While the state bureaucracy was paralyzed, a small group of volunteers simply started calling pharmacies. "I resolved this ambiguity in a very startup-y way: I googled for the phone number of the Walgreens at Fourth and Townsend in San Francisco," recalls Patrick McKenzie, a key figure in the story. "Without identifying myself or giving any preamble I asked, 'Could a 65 year old get the Covid vaccine, and, if so, how?'" The pharmacist answered, and the team realized the information was accessible to anyone who asked.
Most problems are solvable. But that doesn't mean the solution will look like you hope it will; there will be trade offs.
This section is the piece's strongest argument. It moves from abstract philosophy to actionable strategy. The failure of the state bureaucracy wasn't a lack of resources, but a lack of agency—a failure to ask the simplest question. The volunteers succeeded because they treated the problem as solvable and looked for the shortest path to the information they needed.
Bottom Line
Henrik Karlsson's essay succeeds by stripping away the mystique of "genius" and replacing it with a replicable mindset of curiosity and flexibility. The strongest part of the argument is the redefinition of agency as a gentle attunement to reality rather than an aggressive conquest of it. However, the piece's biggest vulnerability is its reliance on high-agency outliers like Herzog and Glass, whose resilience may be harder to emulate for those facing systemic barriers that no amount of individual creativity can easily bypass. Readers should watch for the next step: how to apply this "unbundling" of goals to their own specific, mundane constraints without falling into the trap of self-blame when the path isn't immediately clear.