Who holds the power in your decision making? You? Or someone else?

I've been mentioning this often of late, as there has been a growing shift in the questions from young men (and older men), asking for my suggestions on the future and what they need to be doing...

I don't know what the future "holds", no more than anyone else does. I can hypothesize like anyone else (and maybe be accurate), but I cannot offer certainty.

No one can.

The only way to reconcile this unpredictability is to control your own Self

That is Agency.

Agency is not only autonomy

A common cognitive dissonance gap is with Men who, externally, they are autonomous in that they have a job, they went to college maybe, they've done all the "right things" you are supposed to do to be considered responsible...

But they don't THINK for themselves. Their paths have been given to them, sometimes very explicitly. They have little depth to their lives because they've followed a formula of what they are supposed to do.

And they found empty, or dissatisfying, or flat out disappointing...

They are self-sufficient externally, but they don't have true agency.

This realization is unsettling, a proverbial look in the mirror and seeing you've been deceived, but not knowing what to replace it with.

Agency at its most simple is self-determination

Your own opinions, not lying to yourself, or indulging someone else's lies.

Honesty with your desires, and rejections to what is incongruent with them.

You will never have intuition nor instinct if you rely on others for decision making

As Im so fond of saying, CHOOSE.

Choices are fate, and a man's fate is not his own when choices are put upon him. https://cortes.site/newsletter/