When I write I tend to focus on individual responsibility and agency over discussions about power structures, privileges, and other things that shape the space of action for individuals. I want to reflect on that choice. Anyone who thinks about this for a bit realizes that both agency and structure are important. And they cocreate: the structures are created by individuals acting, and the actions of individuals are limited by structures, and often we also internalize the structure, such that having, for example, an agentic friend group will make you more agentic. Whether agency or structure is the proper thing to focus on depends on the goal. When thinking about helping an individual, agency is much more important than structure: societal structure is really hard to shift, but individuals are nearly always less agentic than they can be, and if they use more of their agency, it is possible for them to navigate to another part of the structure that better fits (getting other friends, moving to a new city, getting a new job, redesigning their life, etc)—so that is more useful. And the overall effect of many individuals caring for their corner of the world and trying to improve etc often has positive spill over effects for others. Thinking about structure when it comes to improving your own life is mostly a way to avoid responsibility, since you can’t do much about large scale structure usually. On the other hand, when I’m thinking about how to care about others, like my kids, I think a lot about structure (though I don’t talk about that with them; I talk about agency). I have more power and resources than them and so feel like I have a responsibility to push the structures they are in in a direction that enables them to grow and flourish. I think it is good to focus on agency when it comes to myself, and creating enabling structures when it comes to others (so they can be agentic too). I feel the same way about society at large, though I don’t have strong intuition politics or large scale structures—those are too complex for me to have a strong feel for (though I have some rough mental models from studying economics and political philosophy that I think are somewhat useful). (How can we enable cultures that lead to flourishing, how to we block incentives that work against us, how to we make sure good norms and skills spread, etc etc? ) But I think that is a pretty good trade off re agency vs structure: if we all do the best we can to shape our situation to solve our problems and shoulder our problems and care for our loved ones, and also, do our best to be convivial when it comes to our relationships to others—thinking about how our actions can be of use, creating structures that enable more people to flourish. So a little bit like agency for me and everyone I interact with as individuals, but structure when it comes to thinking about the large scale impact of my actions, and how to support those who are in a weaker position than me. Since I mostly address individual readers on the newsletter, I tend to focus on agency.