The Time to Reclaim Your Agency is Now, or, Money, Power, and Love

Hi! How’s everyone? Welcome back old friends, welcome new ones, and here’s a hug from little Snowy.

Today we’re going to discuss…a principle. One I think that many of you are going to need to employ more and more. We’ve been discussing it in sessions, of course, and we began to discuss it a while back: maximizing your agency. 

Now perhaps you see more viscerally just how severe and serious the stakes are. 

This is the moment that you need to reclaim your agency. Because now every choice you take is riskier than ever.

Now you take control over your destiny, or you won’t have much of one left.

So settle in and let’s gently talk about it.

Why “How Bad Will Things Get?” is the Wrong Question

I hear it a lot these days. It’s a refrain. How bad will things get? How much worse?

Only it’s precisely the wrong question.

The correct way to think about all this—and by that I mean everything from Trump shredding the economy, to authoritarianism, to the plague of folly that surrounds us, and much more, right down to climate change (remember that?) itself—is…

Much simpler.

With more clarity.

Aren’t things bad enough?

How much worse sort of doesn’t matter when things are already this bad. It’s just a psychological crutch, really. A way to let us avoid making hard choices in the here and now.

But the here and now is what matters. Not just in an abstract be-here-now sort of way, but in a very real one. A pragmatic one. 

The emergency is happening before your eyes. Hello, fascism came to LA. Trump’s looting the coffers not to mention ripping up the world economy. I could go on, but you don’t need me to.

Things are already bad enough that there’s no point whatsoever wondering: how much worse will they get.

This is the point at which you reclaim your agency, or else. 

Or Else What? AKA, the Evisceration of Agency

Or else you won’t have much left.

Pretty simple answer, no? What do you think authoritarianism is? It’s the evisceration of agency.

And the evisceration of human agency is the great theme of this age.

What does a sort of creepy, disgusting, weird “technology” like AI do? It strips us our agency. Hey, look, there are “Large Language Models”—whoops, I meant the most uninformed and dorkiest and most idiotic opinions in all of human history—now making our choices for us.

Making our choices for us.

I suggest, in fact, scratch that, let me give you some actual homework—who and what is making choices for you?

Not an abstract question.

Sit down and think about it. Reflect on it. Make a list. Don’t worry, I’m going to help you, but I want you to do this.

Reclaiming your agency is a practice, not some sort of passive exercise. And I want you to do it. Live it. The way you begin is pretty simple. Answer an elementary question.

What and or what is making my choices for me?

Do that, and your world is going to begin to change for the better. Maybe our world can. But don’t do it, and guess what? You’re going to get more and more entrapped by the day. 

By predatory capitalism, by fascism and authoritarianism, by the mockery AI makes of human knowledge and intellect, by the way that culture’s become an exercise in peddling the lowest common denominator while the world burns. And your life turns to dust.

Don’t be a victim. Our culture seems to love victimhood at the moment. It’s our cheap reward for getting burned, scarred, and traumatized, and we’re supposed to revel in it as we share it, only it’s not a very good one. The price of martyrdom’s pretty steep, you’re not alive anymore.

And don’t tell me you don’t spend a whole lot of time these days feeling dead inside. That feeling? Panic, despair, deadness, that cycle? It is the visceral emotional experience of the loss of agency.

There’s a message in them when you feel those emotions. They are warning you: my agency is being stripped away.

Now let’s try to work with that.

Thinking About Money and Power, or, Reclaiming Your Financial Agency

In sessions, I’ve been teaching a lot of you an overarching theme. 

You are going to have to reclaim your financial agency.

If you don’t do it, you’re going to end up at the mercy of the morons running the show, and that’s a very good way to lose even more money even faster, in the blink of an eye. Want to be around shortly when the bond market cracks? When the delusional stock market craters? As the dollar keeps on plummeting lower than Donald Trump’s moral soul?

I didn’t think so.

Reclaiming your financial agency is…hard. Because so much of it’s been stripped away, and we’re told that that’s a good thing. It is, at least if you’re predatory capitalism. It ends up with your money. What do you end up with? Holding the bag.

So what we’ve been discussing in sessions is many things in this particular theme. Many of your financial advisors are…to call them behind the curve would be kind. Many of you shout and curse openly, which is funny, and I like it, but the point is: mostly, right now, your money’s in a prison, and the prison’s on fire, because the crackpots have run riot and taken it over.

You’re going to have to liberate yourself from many of America’s broken financial structures, institutions, and ideas. Don’t kid yourself that a 401K’s going to fund anyone’s retirement anymore. The choices that the system presents you with are constrained so tight they might as well be suffocating you. I’ve seen people locked into American financial structures presenting them with five, maybe seven choices, all of which were: would you like to give Donald Trump all your money, or only 90% of your money?

These are catastrophically failing systems.

Americans don’t know it yet, well, maybe you do, after reading me, but the systems that keep their money captive in American financial assets are going to burn their money away. They already are, after all. See the dollar sliding? See every single financial market in America dancing right at the edge of ruin? 

In America, financial structures were designed to a) keep your money captive b) never give you very many choices and c) tell you that was a good thing. Even when you were getting dribs and drabs of the very broken paradigm of predatory capitalism that was ripping your future apart, yet they were enough to maybe mollify, it wasn’t enough. It was still a Very Bad Deal.

But now? It’s a deadly one.

So you are going to have to reclaim your financial agency, if you want any real chance at a future, or else you’ll Sink With the Ship. And that means everything from finding financial advisors who aren’t golfing most of the day, and telling you everything’s going to be fine for the five minutes they do actual work, to building a more streamlined, effective, and far less risky modern portfolio (yes, we’re trying to launch my little model portfolio this week, for those who are interested), to sitting down with people like me, and I know there aren’t many out there, who can guide you and teach you, and so on.

Don’t reclaim your financial agency now? Not just now as in: hey, maybe I’ll get around to it next year. Now as in: right now. I won’t answer the question for you, I’ll just ask: how much more wealth do you think Donald Trump is going to lose, loot, pilfer, or destroy? 

Those are the stakes, and you should take them seriously, because they’re as lethal as it gets. And yet you can see that while everyone’s panicked, almost no one’s actually reclaiming their financial agency. So learn the lesson here: you should.

This is the most basic way to take control of your destiny, and while it’s mundane and boring, it matters. So get started. Because you can’t do much of the below until you do the above.

Why My Friends are Unhappy, or, Reclaiming Your Existential Agency

There’s a theme I’ve noticed with my friends lately. They’re pretty unhappy. So much so that it’s comical at times. And that, too, has become a kind of cultural touchstone. Our misery in the burning idiot’s dystopia everything’s become is the butt of every joke. And that’s funny, but the joke’s on you.

The point, as a wise man once said, is to change it.

You should be reclaiming your existential agency. And this one’s about a lot. Relationships. Family, friends, marriage, lovers, and more. How you exist together in a world coming apart.

Nobody should sit there in an unhappy relationship and founder. That’s always true, but it’s doubly true in times like these. Let me put it even more bluntly, if your partner’s making you miserable, dragging you down, then maybe it’s time to think twice. But not just in the trivial way. Think about it with me.

All this is existential. And it’s going to be for a lot of relationships, too. I mean this, because this is a turning point for all of us, and many relationships won’t survive it. If you want to, then of course, you can’t go on just hoping a partner is magically going to change. So you have to at least test these waters now.

Hey, sweetheart, are you really…are you really going to sit there and let Donald Trump throw away our lives? Are you going to…help us make a plan? That’s just one example, and I’ve tied it to the last form of agency so that you see what I mean, but of course, it’s much bigger than that.

None of us, and I genuinely mean this, should be tied much longer to people who don’t and won’t engage at an existential level with themselves and the world. 

Who don’t understand the stakes. Can’t use the words authoritarianism, fascism, meltdown, self-destruction. Are sort of sitting there playing video games instead of doing their job, which isn’t the one they go to, but is taking care of you. 

People who won’t even try to grapple with the existential challenge of now? That’s a kind of betrayal in times like these, and the unhappiness so many people feel is really, I think, rooted in that place. We need to exist together, in times as troubled as these, but hey, you’re not really here with me.

I hate to say it, but in sessions, this also sometimes emerges as a theme. And it’s not OK. A partner should of course “pull their weight,” and you can go right ahead and ask my poor list of ex-girlfriends if I ever did, because I’m not saying I’m a saint, I’m saying I’m a sinner, but in times like these, “pulling your weight” isn’t just about doing the goddamned dishes.

It’s about a plan. It’s about a strategy. For your lives. Together. Because that’s how we live them. And in a relationship, in times as turbulent as these, or a family system, we are going to have to embrace existential change now, and plan for it. Not just accept a dull, dreary existence in a world that’s quickly going to hell, because when you put those two things together, you’re in two forms of hell.

I think that these days a whole lot more of us need to be having conversations about our existential agency being stripped away even by those who love us, or should love us, or say they love us, only don’t, or don’t enough, or won’t enough. And so very quickly, our levels of fulfillment hit rock bottom.

It is perfectly OK to sit down and say: hey, I am being existentially unravelled by you, and perhaps deeply so, because my agency seems to be vanishing here. In this partnership, in this marriage, in this friendship, in this relationship. And I am going to redraw the boundaries, rules, codes, and above all, reclaim the powers of existence that I have.

If you can’t do that with people you’re close to, after all, what chance do you have with…those you aren’t? And if the people you’re close don’t respect this, can’t, or won't, then let me give you some tough advice, which is maybe too tough, but like I said, this is hell-or-high-water time. Maybe it’s not working the way it should be working.

I encourage all of you to think about whether or not your relationships are really helping you maximize your agency in this sense right now. Individually, sure, collectively, too, but most of all, existentially. Because that is really the point of a relationship. When we say this sort of phrase, “this person helps me become a better version of myself,” and I really dislike that phrasing, because it’s reductive, what it means is: a relationship should be an existentially liberating thing. 

Not a prison. Because we’re already in so many prisons. The one Trump wants to turn America into, the one predatory capitalism made of our lives, the one that our fools’ politics reduced our possibilities to, the one a dying planet’s trapping us in.

Our lives are, right now, an existential prison.

Nobody should be in any of these prisons. But we have to accept some of them, anyways, as the price of the bad choices others make. Yet never should we add our own bad choices to this increasingly long list, nor just sort of accept it all passively, because then we’re in prison after prison after prison.

And in this context, our bad choices are the weakness, reluctance, hesitation, to reclaim ourselves. Hey, I love you so much that I’m going to stay right here in prison with you. That’s not love, my friends. Love is: I am going to break us both out, and I’ll drag you with me kicking and screaming if I have to, and if you still won’t go, then I will, because one of us, at least, should live. 

Love is reciprocity, a mutuality, and if someone wants to stay imprisoned so badly that they want to imprison you too, let me break it to you a little too brutally, but someone has to be your friend: they don’t really love you much at all, if at all. Maybe they don’t know what it really is, maybe they’re weak, maybe, maybe, maybe, but at this point, just like asking, “how much worse will things get?,” it doesn’t matter. The point is that they don’t, whether they’re not capable of it, don’t think you deserve it, or don’t think they deserve it.

This part of reclaiming your agency? I know it’s hard. Much harder than sitting down and talking to your financial advisor. They’re just dorks. These are people you care about, and who are supposed to care about you. And so these discussions require negotiation, tact, intellect, concern, and sophistication. 

Never is it black or white. So I’m not saying approach in the style of a duel, or with daggers drawn, but I am saying: this is the moment you should be evaluating if your relationships really work in the context of a destabilizing world. Can they withstand the rising temperature?

Because right now the risk, the price, of having ones that don’t is going up by the day. Not just financially, though of course there’s that, but just in terms of your own happiness, fulfillment, sense of worth, purpose. All of those are in sharp decline, and if you want to be someone who still has them, then you need to reclaim your agency over them.

And if you feel dead, if you feel devalued, if you feel small, then it’s definitely time to have these discussions. Maybe well past time. Believe me when I tell you that however the discussions go, you’ll feel better after having them, and your world will begin to expand at that very instant.

It’s OK to have many different forms of partnerships, friendships, marriages, relationships. It doesn’t have to be one size fits all. Existence never really was, only as the world gets more authoritarian and fascist, that’s how culture, now firmly in the hands of crackpots, morons, lunatics, and regressive instruments of fear, violence, domination, and control makes it seem. But are we all to be tradwives and chest-beating ubermensch? As the world goes to hell? Give me a break. And give yourself one, too.

So here we’re talking about taking control of your destiny in a deeper sense. An existential one. What you mean, to whom, how, and why. And I’ve come to think this is going to matter and more for so many of us in the coming years. Because at existential moments like this, either we free each other—or we imprison one another. 

Dickens and Orwell and Sartre understood this well. But do we?

Reclaiming Your Moral Agency

I think that there’s another kind of agency that we have to reclaim too, and this one’s the hardest and most abstract. 

Moral agency.

Now. When people ask the question: “how much worse will it get?,” what are they really doing? They’re giving up their moral agency. They’re sort of saying: I am a passive thing. 

But the truth is that none of us are morally powerless. We all have this power, and lots of it, only we don’t use it, because predatory capitalism imploding into fascism is very, very good at making us feel scared, and we’re supposed to feel dead to begin with, which is how we got here. We’re huddled atop the ashes of a fading dream. And yet we almost never ask the question: why does this suffocating way of living make us feel so empty and hopeless?

The fact is that almost anything can reclaim your moral agency. Anything, yes, really. Want to start…a Democracy Preservation League? Go right ahead. How about a book group, only not one where you read dumb shit Bestsellers About Nothing, but, I don’t know, actual good and great and wise books with curious and intelligent people? Sounds pretty good to me.

There are even simpler things. I started writing poetry again after many, many years, and I decided that this time, I’ll even share it with you, not here, but at another place. I mean, please don’t ever actually read it, but the point is that even that is an exercise in moral agency, because of course, it’s the exercise of moral imagination. What’s life really about? Money? Wrong. Life, justice, truth, beauty, goodness. And we can express these in many ways.

That is moral agency.

We had all better exercise more moral agency in a world run amok. And you might think that it doesn’t matter, but let me guarantee you that in a way, it matters the most. There’s a reason that authoritarian fascist regimes always control what people read, see, and hear, and that reason is that there’s nothing more dangerous than igniting someone’s moral agency. Do it enough, and in fact, you have not just a “resistance,” but a transformation, a revolution, in the possibilities of human intellect, body, and soul. 

People start to give a shit. And we both know that right now they don’t, because those of whose job it is to spark moral agency aren’t doing a good enough job of it. Not in music, art, film, literature, thinking, anything—it’s mostly sort of vacuous and empty. Netflix culture. Its only job is to keep you dead. It’s a coffin, but just because it’s safer inside, doesn’t mean you should climb in.

Don’t kid yourself, and this is one of predatory capitalism’s greatest lies, that making people feel alive doesn’t matter. Why do you think America doesn’t do that much? Right down to everything being sort of downright ugly and uninspiring and drab and dull. Because it’s the most dangerous thing of all.

So you can and should dedicate yourself, too, to reclaiming your moral agency. Enough with the stupid stuff. No more. You probably waste too much time, way too much time, on it. Don’t do that. Not anymore. I can’t tell you much it improves life to cut the stuff of emptiness out of it. But can you really feel alive any other way?

Now is the time to embrace, as a good and wise and beautiful friend of mine says to me, the sublime, the profound, the timeless, that which is good and noble and true in the highest and deepest ways. That is the antidote to all this ugliness.

Don’t stay trapped in this ugliness and deadness, baffled, asking the same old pointless question: “how much worse will things get?” You know the answer to that one already, so stop asking. Just go out there and be brave and wise and cool enough to live your life in a way that rebels against all this deadness.

Here we are talking, like Camus, about love, which is the underpinning of all moral systems. It’s the point of life, after all. But I don’t mean that in a trivial way. It’s what the bad guys really fear. You see, to fall in love is to reclaim your moral agency. Even if it’s just over something as small as yourself. What the bad guys count on is taking our agency away, inch by inch, blow by blow. And deadening us to it. We must always be fighting back, not just harder, but smarter, and that means, from a higher place. 

Our institutions are failing because they forgot all that. How long has it been since Harvard tried to give its students true and genuine and expansive moral agency? Not just teach them dumb shit theories that’d turn them into good little doctrine-quoting neoliberals? But churning out miniature Ezra Kleins isn’t going to save the world from anything, beginning with boring us all to the next level of hell, right down to the fascists. So understand what all this really means. And why it matters so.

To take back your ability and capacity to love is what really counts right now. In a world going dead in the soul, spirit, body, and mind. Is Netflix going to help you do that? How about TikTok? Etc. Nope. But a great book, film, painting, doesn’t matter, even theorem, will. And so on. Moral agency is like that. It is an expansion of you and an elevation within you. Our institutions have failed disastrously at that. We went dead inside. They failed to ignite the spark in us. So now you must.

This is the truest way of taking control of your destiny. If you do this, and do it well, your life will change. Your possibilities will be radically different. Because you will be. You will be the rarest thing of all in a world going haywire, eviscerating everyone’s agency, which is to say, a human being stretching towards the fullest definition of one.

And tie that back to my first question. Who or what is making your choices for you? See the link? If not, let me make it clear. Moral agency is the most dangerous thing of all, which is why nobody much wants you to ever really exercise it. Not predatory capitalism, that’s for sure, often not the institutions around you, and maybe not even your family, partners, friends. That’s how deep this challenge of reclaiming your selfhood really goes. Not easy. But. Necessary.

That’s really the theme that connects all this. Money, relationships, your life, all of it. That’s what all these failed systems and freakshow fascists really want to burn up, in the end. You, in this truest and deepest and noblest of ways. And if you let them—that part’s on you.

As always, if you need help or advice, just reach out.

Lots of <3.

Umair (and Snowy!!)

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