shaping the ideas that shape us /native /believein 🇵🇸

Your point about the compounding is interesting in particular because it suggests that agency could be something that, if lost, becomes increasingly hard an beyond some point perhaps impractical to regain. Scary thought.

In Islam there is this idea that sin causes a “disease of the heart.” The more sin you commit, the more you dirty and harm your heart. You stray further from God. 

Piety and worship cleanses the heart, but the longer you ignore the issue the harder it becomes to fix. 

I believe agency is similar, which is why it’s so critical to cultivate it in children.

I've thought about this in terms of a "spark"

The idea being that everyone is born with a spark, but it needs protecting from the world in which most people have lost theirs

And I've wondered if and once you lose it, maybe you can never get it back

I still have it, but I sometimes wonder if I didn't quit my first job in investment banking after my second year, if I might have lost it after another year or two on that path

I like to think that I wouldn't have, and that I am who I am, but I'm not sure

And I wonder if I'd lost it, if I would have been able to get it back