Fate vS. AGency

What should I accept and what should I fight?

It’s a question I often wake with, particularly when I am trying to do something very hard —

How much should I even try today? 

How much will my efforts, should I succeed in making them, count towards the ends I would like to achieve? How much resistance — whether from nature, society or my DNA — is out there? Is it, like the idea so vividly imprinted on us by Shakespeare, that “all the world is a stage, and we merely players”? Or is it as Shakespeare suggests in another time and place, that “there is nothing in heaven and earth, but thinking makes it so?” 

We are two-headed about fate and agency. There are days when we know we will escape the restriction of our births — our innate qualities and family structures, our material and cultural conditions, our minds and bodies. Other days, we are Achilles, with that dodgy heel, or Arjuna, dispatched on a lose-lose assignment. 

And the less said of Oedipus, the better.

Essays/Texts

Coming Next in Fate Vs. Agency > Subscribe to Get a New Essay in Your Inbox Weekly

• How Did I End Up Here?: REading Middlemarch, George Eliot, 1871-2

• Is My Future Already Written?: Reading The Initial Sequencing and Analysis of the Human Genome, International Consortium, 2001