Pick curiosity, not acceptance.

Sometimes you know the answer, you just don't know it ... yet.

For the past two weeks, my shower has been broken. One of the little holes on the top part of the shower head only spouts cold water. To put it lightly, it’s been thoroughly pricking my face.

Every morning, I wondered what I could do…

Should I go buy another shower head?

Should I call in a plumber?

Should I just “thug it out”, David Goggins style, accepting it as a part of my shower life?

I’ve wasn’t happy about it, but I had accepted it, because the work-to-pain tradeoff seemed too high. I just went on with my day.

A lot of tiny problems are like that in life. Crumbles of annoyances.

Everything is a tradeoff, so you pick the problems that are worth solving. If we tried solving everything we could, we would go crazy. If we solved none of our problems, we would also crazy.

What if, there was a solution, that was “cheaper”? This might be sampling bias, but the first solution you think of is … usually ass. If solution was cheap + easy, it wouldn’t be a “real“ problem. The problems that persistent, and may require some mental energy to solve, we never give the time of day. They fall by the wayside, they’ve become accepted annoyances (kinda like my shower problem).

Acceptances in your life, are just problems you didn’t have the agency to resolve. This poses the question. Why do some of the most “agentic” people in our lives struggle in specific areas of their life?

Cate Hall

mentioned that we are selectively agentic in different parts of their lives. But why?

I consider myself pretty creative, solution-wise, especially in research/academics, but my brain couldn’t deal with a shower head.

We are myopic to simple problems, but why. Why are we so jaggedly agentic?

Jaggedly Agentic

I think the answer is cognitive laziness. Not actually being lazy, just heuristic-like shortcuts and mental groupings. Kinda like when you call one friend someone else’s name because they’re similar “kinds” of friends to you. It’s your mind’s way of creating a set of heuristics or plans to solve something when, in reality there are many more approaches. And we often learn these approaches from other people, people that are no smarter than we are.

For example, back in 6th grade, I was trying to draw a house. I needed a ruler. Why? Well, I saw my teacher use a ruler to draw the lines of the house. So that must be the “right” way of doing things. Then I just saw someone use the side of a sheet of paper:

“That’s so obvious, how did I not think of that?”

I’m sure we’ve all had our moments like this.

From this, my first guess was we need agentic inspiration. Other people to open our eyes to agentic solutions or non-default ways of doing things. Similar to when Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute barrier, and then everyone could do it. When someone shows you a clever way of doing something, it becomes the “norm” or dominant heuristic. Going back, I’m pretty sure by the end of middle school, everyone knew to use anything straight as a straight-edge.

This is however is a solution that doesn’t really scale. We would need role models that are more agentic than we are in every domain of life, which is hard for a variety of reasons. This made me think, is there a first-principles (sorry) way of becoming more agentic?

Curiosity-Driven Agency

I think a potential answer is curiosity.

If we view agency like

Escaping Flatland

as direction + will, in other words, in linear algebra terms a “vector”. Then, curiosity would be pursuing orthogonal subspaces that you didn’t even know existed. The shortest/clearest path isn’t necessarily the best path. Exploring combining some other vectors to reach a path may actually be much better and yield paths you wouldn’t have even noticed.

Have you ever come up with a great solution to a friend’s problem? One that seemed so obvious to you, but they could never have imagined? This is the same reason why, we so often can’t see solutions to our own problems. Basically, when we encounter a new type of problem, our curiosity can shine through.

I feel the most agentic when I genuinely want to help someone. Literally putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, but with different priors.

For example, my girlfriend at the time, had lost her 170$ parking pass. A sheet of paper that included a security guard’s signature, a date, and a couple logos of the apartment complex.

In one of my proudest agentic moments, I asked her to go out to the parking lot, take photos of other people’s parking passes, reverse image searched all the photos. Found the exact same font (Garamond), faked a signature (thank you 3rd grade reading logs), and scaled it into a new perfect parking pass, which we proceeded to lightly crumpled up.

So, why can’t we do that with problems we already have in our lives?

The answer is we can; consider the following steps.

1. Ignore your priors. Imagine I’ve never seen a shower head before.

2. Be curious. How does this work? Where are the main component that make it up? What’s broken? Can I change it in anyway? Can I replace it?

3. Look at the problem from multiple-levels. Okay, so I could replace the whole thing. Or I could try to change the current form so that it works.

4. A solution will (probably) come to you. Let me just twist the shower head 90 degrees so that the cold water part extends outward from the side wall and not me. Welp goddamnit, that was easy.

This is admittedly really hard. It is difficult to go back to the same environment, the same situation, same people, and do something completely different. Especially when your brain is locked in place.

I think the best way to start this is to just approach one thing that you want, think is annoying, or find important, and just start looking at it.

Sure, it’s more work upfront, but when you really look, you’ll see that there are solutions all around you.

So here’s a shower thought: Is there truly no other way?