The Year of Agency

Last year, 2025, was touted as the year of (AI) agents. I’m calling 2026 the year of agency (mine that is). This year, every week, I am going to exercise my agency in the pursuit of self-discovery.

Why?

This past month, I’ve been thinking on whether I want to move out from my 6 bedroom apartment in San Francisco, and more specifically, “out on my own.” the reason this has been so pressing as of recent is I have been doing a bit of searching for self-identity. I recall voicing a concern with my roommate Tristan, a move-out candidate himself, that “I’m more my own person than ever before, but I worry living on my own may preempt me from ‘strengthening this muscle.’” In the past year, I’d been increasingly resistant to the “group think” so pervasive in my large, 10-odd friend group, but I’ve gotten so much better at deciding what I really wanted for myself, even if it goes against the grain.

Grappling with this mentally, I was granted salvation in form of podcast sound bite. I sometimes listen to this brilliant online personality known as “Dr. K”, a.k.a. “Dr. Alok Kanojia” of Healthy Gamer. Dr. K tackles a lot of new age problems not commonly handled in traditional psycho-therapy practices. Listening to this clip titled “What Nobody Tells You About your 30s” with my girlfriend Valorie on a road trip, it all clicked for me!

Dr. K on finding yourself

“When we have exploration, followed by commitment; that’s when we end up with a well-formed identity”

The video explains how to discover yourself which involves 2 major dimensions:

1. Exploration
2. Commitment

but many people often fall into the common pitfalls of:

1. Moratorium (exploring many things without committing to any)
2. Foreclosure (committing to something without sufficient exploration)

There’s a lot of interesting content in this 20 minute video, but the real crux I want to distill in this blog post is this: self-determination theory. It states humans develop identity through autonomy, competence, and relatedness. In this post I want to specifically discuss autonomy. Intuitively, we believe we must figure out “who we are” in order to start living our life “the way we should”, but conversely, exercising autonomy is what really drives self-discovery.

I’m not sure I’ve effectively summarized the learnings, so I’d suggest just watching the video if it’s of interest to you. The key take away is by self-regulating the direction of your life, your understanding of your own identity will follow.

So that brings us back to the headline of this post: This year, every week, I am going to exercise my agency in the pursuit of self-discovery.

I’d like to write a post each week about my exhibitions of agency, and describe any learnings, findings, etc. I will list them in the table below.

Vegan w/ Bacon

I find often times people create self-imposed rules or constraints, which they intend to help guide them through a tough challenge or project. But sometimes those rules are the exact reason they falter. I did see this idea on tiktok, so forgive me, but I love the example.

The idea is that people who would otherwise go vegan, don’t because they “can’t give up bacon…” or cheese, or whatever. The point is, no matter their reasoning for approaching veganism, they would be net positive if they were to just “go vegan but still eat bacon.” I think there are a lot of times in my life I’ve experienced these self-imposed rules preventing me from accomplishing more than I otherwise would have, despite their intention to guide and optimize my progress.

Therefore, I herby declare, there are no rules!

The Year of Agency Project