Against the Agency-Maxxing Industrial Complex
The Structure, Incentives, and Negative Externalities of “You Can Just Do Things”
In No One is Even Trying, Applied Divinity Studies provides three compelling examples and relevant statistics showing that high performers often succeed through basic effort rather than exceptional talent. This leads to the reader asking themselves, “Am I even trying?”
This blog post archetype is often the most popular posts from a given blogger. Some other examples include:
Maybe you’re not Actually Trying - Cate Hall (18,159 likes, her #1 most popular blog post)
How to be more agentic - Cate Hall (3,330 likes, her #2 most popular blog post)
How I practice at what I do - Tyler Cowen (142 comments, compared to 41 and 61 comments for the other two posts that day)
The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday - Kishore Nallan (his #1 most popular blog post)
Every single decently written instantiation of this blog post garners high engagement. Or maybe I’m falling into this trap:
At the risk of sounding arrogant, I wrote a decent instantiation of this type of blog post as my third post, No One is Really Working. That post went viral and is still my most popular piece by far. Without sounding even more arrogant, I knew that it would take off, even though it existed in obscurity for over 135 days. Just look at how many variations of “you can just do things” went viral on X in the past year.
The predictability of virality demonstrates that there is an underlying structure to these agency posts that can be analyzed and replicated. No One is Really Working set out to test my theory in production. It achieved virality, so either my theory is true or I just got lucky.
In this post, I first describe the structure and steps to replicate popular agency posts, then explain why these posts impose a strict negative externality on the world.
Post Structure and Incentives
Agency posts send the reader a clear message: you are capable of doing much, much more.
No One is Even Trying shows the reader that famous directors, YouTubers, and writers are the only ones even putting in a modicum of effort. If you did a fraction of this, you could realize outsized gains.
Maybe you’re not Actually Trying tells a story where her husband does the obvious things of contacting relevant authorities to resolve her stalker. If you applied similar obvious problem solving processes to your own life, imagine all the problems you could solve.
How I practice at what I do outlines Tyler’s day of reading, writing, talking, and eating. If you did the things you already do with more intentionality and consistency, you could be as productive as Tyler.
Who the author is doesn’t matter. Applied Divinity Studies was an anonymous nobody writing a niche internet blog. Cate Hall is the CEO of Astera, and previously a lawyer, poker player, and drug addict. Tyler Cowen is an economics professor who also has a podcast. Kishore Nallan is a programmer from India who bootstrapped an open-source text search company.
To be sure, if you have pre-existing social capital, this allows you to write a more generic – possibly Straussian – blog post, as your post compresses people’s preexisting context of you into the post itself (Cate, Tyler). But it is entirely possible to write a post that draws from no or very little preexisting context (ADS, Kishore).
People enjoy these posts because it provides the reader with a momentary escape into a counterfactual world where they are these agency-maxxing individuals living their best lives. The post enables the reader to be instantly transported into their own utopia. The reader comes to the simple and correct conclusion that the only thing keeping me between their current life and this utopia is doing the things I already know I should be doing.
The post achieves this by inundating you with explicit comparisons to successful individuals in hopes of extrinsically motivating you. Much like the hyper-optimized child of an Asian Tiger mom, the changes are unsustainable, leading to burnout and self-resentment.
Negative Externalities and the Way Out
In Maybe you’re not Actually Trying, Cate Hall writes:
“People are not just high-agency or low-agency in a global sense, across their entire lives. Instead, people are selectively agentic.”
This is semantically true: people choose their battles in the parts of life they care about more. However, this deceives the reader as it allows them to justify the shortcomings in their own lives where they are somewhat more agentic in certain domains. This leads the reader to believe that they can easily scale their agency levels from 0 to 100 based on context.
In reality, truly agentic people are overwhelmingly better across the board. Talk with any person at the top of their field and you’ll quickly learn how deep their thought processes apply to other parts of their lives. How you do anything is how you do everything.
This is why these posts do much more harm than good in aggregate. They provide temporary dopamine highs, where the reader feels like they accomplished something by reading the post and plotting how they will implement it into their daily lives.
The truth is that most people don’t live any more agentically and never will. When I read one of these posts, I often reflect on moments where I know what a more agentic version of myself would have done. That utopia does not exist. In practice, I wither back down to my baseline. Worse, it creates a negative reinforcement loop where I kick myself for not doing something when I know I should have.
The only positive consequentialist result of these posts occurs when the author leverages the popularity as a top-of-funnel to channel into stewarding other ideas with positive externalities. It’s a signaling equilibrium where the type of person who could replicate a good agency post might have other interesting things to say.
So let’s get it on.
Popularity prediction hash: 475a712139b46775901f3eeda4039f2014c8a7bfec0b245bc117943c025caff1
EDIT (2025-11-21): Swapped the title and subtitle (did not change the hash so it is now associated with the subtitle)
I strongly disagree.
You make an erroneous leap here: "That utopia does not exist. In practice, I wither back down to my baseline...I kick myself for not doing something when I know I should have."
You are obviously someone who learns from experience. I'd argue you are above the agency threshold where further agency gains have diminishing returns. So you kicking yourself has no bearing on other people kicking themself (especially the target audience).
Your reaction is common in high-agency, high-ambition humans (people prone to imposter syndrome, success anxiety, etc). Doing your blogging practice, and being someone whose writing I even respect enough to reply at length, demonstrates that you are already one of these exceptional people rather than one of these "most people".
Per your argument, if there are in fact people who are hopelessly non-agentic, who will never learn from any content they ingest, or whatever you are trying to argue... please demonstrate a nontrivial example?
By repeated exposure, even if it takes 5-10 years, I believe and have only experienced (hundreds of times over) that humans -- even in the depths of poverty and low trust low agency cultures -- are very capable of learning new skills.
And especially so when the book or blog post or essay or email strikes just right... and turns on a light somehow.
p.s. this is precisely the premise of my new business venture, simply that exposing people to ambition can create immense value in the world, and I believe it is the crux of Paul Graham's trillion-dollar institution (based on studying the public words and interviews of Patrick Collison and many others, as well as direct friends who are YC alumni). Excited to prove you wrong in 10-20yrs :)
for anyone interested - https://www.youtube.com/@capitalismUnlocked
I agree with your initial diagnosis and it's a good read, but like the first comment said the part where you say:
"Talk with any person at the top of their field and you’ll quickly learn how deep their thought processes apply to other parts of their lives. How you do anything is how you do everything"
is unfounded and IME doesn't ring true. Simple example: how many top AI researchers or CEOs do you know that can actually dress well (one day of agency to understand what goes with what) or fix their weird social ticks during interviews etc.
Marc Benioff is still fat. Nadella is still bald. Almost none of top artists have a top physique from what I've seen.
Many such cases