2025: The Year of Agency
This year, let's turn inward first, then outward again, armed with a stronger locus of control.
Much of the West has fallen victim to cultures that seek to externalize one’s locus of control. Finding scapegoats and villains around every corner is too easy without that locus. This is an invitation for a few of us to reclaim our agency.
I recognize that 2024 was a year in which we collectively scrutinized so many of humanity’s evils—as the contours of depraved power syndicates were revealed.
But 2025 is the year we seize control—not of others but of ourselves.
It’s too easy to chase comfort, whether one more bite, one more video, or one more degree of re-circulated air.
It’s too easy to blame the partisans, the migrants, the oligarchs, the system, systemic racism/sexism, or the “far-right.”
It’s too easy to withdraw into the digital world and become a society of house cats—fat, lazy, weak, and quick to yowl demands of others.
It’s too easy to forget what virtues are, much less how to practice them. Those who forget to practice the virtues treat politics as morality. It is not.
It’s too easy to outsource core responsibilities to functionaries, middlemen, or people making promises they can never keep. In our disappointment, we whine but fail to act.
Don’t listen to the voices claiming willpower is too scarce or that some political figure, celebrity, or influencer will deliver our salvation. The best any such person can do is afford us more elbow room to exercise our agency, and only for a time. Those who seek power will always be among us. And we must become the counterpower.
But first, we must engage the process—assess, deliberate, and act—which is central to our spiritual annealing. In doing so, we will naturally find one another and organize ourselves, which is also our path to exodus. The cottony confines of the recent past will no longer hold us, but the present will not always be comfortable.
We must regard our posterity as our master and be its humble servants. We must look to the past and accumulate wisdom from those who succeeded and failed before us. We must learn to command the present through a more highly developed internal locus of control.
We can see ourselves as cut adrift on oarless boats. Or we can look inward and see our fates as red-hot steel waiting to be pounded into shape.