You make good points about how to develop agency, but your section on how it’s lost feels incomplete to me.
For instance, as a child my parents had a mostly hands-off approach and let me do what I wanted, but because I’d spent so much time in front of the PC from a young age, the main thing I wanted was to play video games (this was in the late 90s and early 00s, before YouTube and social media). Games aren’t necessarily bad, but they give you pre-packaged goals to complete, when it would be healthier to learn to develop goals on one’s own.
This also ties into the issue of boredom: the easier it is to get rid of boredom (eg via games or feeds), the less one needs to explore to stop being bored.
As for school, I was somewhat contrarian and eg argued with my teachers, but because I lacked goals and ambitions of my own, I adopted those of the school, i.e. getting good marks. And one of the major downsides of that is that marks count down from perfect, which is not at all how real life works; I suspect that some of my perfectionism and risk aversion comes from that time.
(Plus having to get up way too early due to school is probably also not conducive for agency and motivation.)
You make good points about how to develop agency, but your section on how it’s lost feels incomplete to me.
For instance, as a child my parents had a mostly hands-off approach and let me do what I wanted, but because I’d spent so much time in front of the PC from a young age, the main thing I wanted was to play video games (this was in the late 90s and early 00s, before YouTube and social media). Games aren’t necessarily bad, but they give you pre-packaged goals to complete, when it would be healthier to learn to develop goals on one’s own.
This also ties into the issue of boredom: the easier it is to get rid of boredom (eg via games or feeds), the less one needs to explore to stop being bored.
As for school, I was somewhat contrarian and eg argued with my teachers, but because I lacked goals and ambitions of my own, I adopted those of the school, i.e. getting good marks. And one of the major downsides of that is that marks count down from perfect, which is not at all how real life works; I suspect that some of my perfectionism and risk aversion comes from that time.
(Plus having to get up way too early due to school is probably also not conducive for agency and motivation.)