https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=e9YGeVVFynE
The topic today is with respect to other people and what we need to do and what hopefully people will do for us. And this is called a lending agency. When we’re talking about agency, what am I talking about? Well, I think I’ve been over this before, but agency for me is all about time, energy and attention. So you obviously we all have a certain amount of time, a certain amount of energy and a certain amount of attention or focus, focused attention that we can put towards things that enables us to discern, judge and act, take action in the world. And that’s a live streams on discernment, judgment, action, boundaries, etc. Feel free to check out my live streams. But I wanted to cover sort of lending agency and what that’s all about. So, right now a lot of people are sort of told that they’re rational, they’re in control of themselves or they can get control of themselves. And once they do, everything will get better and their lives will improve. That is true. However, there are limits to that, right? If I go to the store and I buy candy and I put the candy in my house, it will get eaten and I am more or less powerless to not eat the candy. This isn’t entirely true, but it’s mostly true. There’s certain types of candy that if I’m around them, I will eat all of that candy until it is gone. And if I get sick, so be it. I have limited self-control. We all have limited self-control. In some areas we have a lot of control over and we can say, I have a lot of self-control here, therefore I have a lot of self-control. That’s false. That’s wrong. Never met that person, never going to meet that person. They wouldn’t be a person. And we have to recognize that. So, what we really need are other people to help us. I have mentioned going to the grocery store and, boy, I’m really hungry. And somebody saying, maybe you should eat your lunch first and then go to the grocery store. Because when you go to the grocery store and you’re really hungry, you tend to buy more food. And a lot of it tends to be junk food. That’s certainly true for me. I know it’s true for a lot of people. A lot of people make jokes about that, right? By people reminding us, they’re lending us their agency. That’s a little way to lend agency. Another way to lend agency is to offer to help somebody, even if they don’t want or need that help. Because you’re reminding them that something needs to be done. That points their attention at the thing. Attention is a core component of agency. So, just reminding somebody of something. That’s already lending agency. Offering to help them is lending more agency because you’re putting more responsibility on them. They feel like, oh, this other person knows about this, that I said I was going to do it or that I said it needed to be done. Maybe I need to just get it done. Maybe seems like a reasonable assumption. It matters because, again, we don’t always have all the control that we need in the moment or overall to do the best that we can do. Having a little boost, getting little reminders, getting a little bit of help moving the furniture, whatever it is, getting some help weeding your garden, all of that adds up. It helps you be a better person. And look, we can’t see all of our flaws and all of our problems and all of our own inefficiencies. The one thing our perspective lacks is perspective on itself. We don’t know ourselves as well as we think we do. We outsource our sanity. We need other people to tell us you’re making this more difficult than you need to. We need people to tell us that’s not a very good idea because you’re not thinking about these consequences. I don’t see all the consequences for all my actions. I don’t expect to, though, either. I’m kind of like, oh, well, I’m kind of a muppet. So the odds that I actually understand all the things that are going to move as a result of me doing one thing are probably zero. I’ll be happy if I get the immediate result I was expecting without immediately getting hurt. So I was out in the garden the other day and I were a few weeds. I was just like, you guys got to go. And I hadn’t planned on gardening, so I just kind of was outside. And I grabbed what I thought was a weed. And it may well have been a weed, but it had nice little barbs in it. It was immediate effect, not what I intended. I did manage to pull out of the ground, though, so it won’t grow there, which is good. I didn’t want it to grow there, weed or not. But yeah, unintended immediate consequences. Note to self, don’t go out in the garden without gardening gloves. We own them for a reason and they are good. You can take your time, energy, and attention and give some of it to someone else. And that boosts them. And you want to be around people that do that for you. You don’t want to be around people that distract you and say, hey, come and work on my project. Come and do this thing that only benefits me. You don’t want to be around exclusively those types of people. You want to be around people who will say, hey, I’ll help you with your thing if you help me with my thing. You want to be around people who, when you offer your help, they offer their help. You want that to be reciprocated. You’re not always going to get that. You shouldn’t get upset. You should lend your agency to others freely. It’s probably something why the Christian ethos works so well. It’s always helpful to people to know that you’re out there thinking about them and their priorities and their concerns. It’s always helpful for people to know that they can call on you for help. And these things are useful to us. And they’re useful to give to others so that we can get them from others. But also, that enriches us. Because one of the ways which we gain perspective on ourselves is by not thinking about ourselves, but thinking about others. And removing our own selfish thought. Like, look, I’d like to spend all of my time, energy, and attention on my projects that only affect me. But when I don’t do that, I gain a better perspective on the projects that affect me. And it enriches my life and makes my stuff more efficient. So I’m not narrowed in, reciprocally narrowed in on only my own stuff, in only my own space. I can also think about what are the things I’m supposed to be doing for others? How can I help them? And then in doing that, I gain perspective on my stuff, things I’m not being efficient about, better ways to do things. I remember when I was in high school, I had a programming course rather deliberately. We were seeking such things out. And I was always happy to program. I had been programming since I was like eight years old or something. So I did all the coursework for the entire year within the first week. All the examples, everything. It’s actually not that hard if you… schoolwork is only so many hours, right? School year when you’re in high school. So it’s very easy to get ahead of that. So what I spent the rest of the time doing was helping everybody else with their assignments. I had already done the assignments. But my goal was to help them and not do my assignments over again because I had already done my assignments. My way. And what I learned in doing that was other people had completely strange and foreign approaches to the same assignments, stuff I never would have thought of. In some cases, I would call them vast improvements over my own approach. Not that I got the assignments wrong. I’m pretty sure I used that course if I remember correctly. But knowing that there’s three, four, five, six different ways to approach the same problem and come to a reasonable answer, maybe within a small variance of efficiency, that’s a good thing to know. Sometimes a whole class of problems has a set of perfectly valid right answers that are reasonable and good to engage in. So in helping those other people and lending them my time, energy, and attention, showing them maybe the bugs in their approach or the limits to their approaches or how to get their approaches to work because they were maybe missing something, a loop type or, you know, they’re missing a variable, didn’t think through the variables they need. That gave me a better appreciation for the work that I had done and enhanced my way of thinking about programming in general and problem solving in general. And I wouldn’t have gotten that any other way, except by helping the other people in the class. And so helping them made me a better software engineer. And yeah, I’m all for that. So you can see where lending your agency or time, energy, and attention to other people helps you and helps them. And everybody wins. Like everybody gets better, even though you’re making a sacrifice, a temporary sacrifice of your time, energy, attention, right? And maybe you’ll get that back. Who knows? You still win. It’s not a loss at all. It helps us to experience our own phenomenology better, right? Our own experiences become richer for it. We gain an appreciation or perspective that we don’t otherwise have when we care for other people, when we attend to other people, when we set aside our own priorities for the priorities of others. This is obviously most market when you have children. Of course, you have to pay attention to those children because some children are neglected and their parents don’t really change much when they have kids. They just think it’s something they should do. They’re acting it out. That’s a terrible tragedy in the world for short, but it does happen. Hopefully it’s rare. I think it’s rare. But most people when they have children, they like gain new perspective on the world and they engage differently. And it enhances and enriches their life in a way that otherwise cannot happen. It’s totally unique. So that’s all wrapped up in this lending of agencies. It’s not just doing charity for others or helping other people for the sake of helping. You’re taking your time, energy and attention, or maybe just one of those things and granting it to them. And that is enhancing them and you at the same time. And in doing that, you make the world a better place. No, really. Screaming at the sky ain’t going to do it. Marching on the Capitol ain’t going to do it. But a little bit of time, energy, attention, care to other people. Yeah, that’ll do it. Just a little bit of lending agency. So I hope that helps you. I hope you realize to some extent that my doing these videos is me lending my agency to you sort of in this group fashion. And I very much get the sense from the views that you’re also lending your agency back to me by giving your time, energy and attention in watching my videos. And hopefully hitting like and subscribe and telling your friends.