What Does It Mean to Remain an Agent in Your Life?

How agency quietly erodes—and why it may matter more than capability as we age

I have been thinking about a word that rarely appears in conversations about aging: agency. What does it mean to remain an agent in your own life?

How Agency quietly disappears

I have seen this shift in my own lifetime.

I used a slide rule at school.

My first job was in a TAB (Australia's largest wagering provider) way before computerisation. I had to add up in my head—no calculators—in a fast-paced environment where mistakes were not tolerated. I loved it.

At university, we punched cards, fed them into a machine, and learned about this new technology on the horizon called “bar codes.” Imagine all the supermarket products having their own unique set of little black bars.

Over my career, I have watched computerisation and systems take over capabilities.

Did we notice?

Or did we simply adapt—and move on?

I watched GPS navigation evolve. When we first started visiting the UK, we acquired an AA map book that sat open on my lap while I navigated. Sometimes I had to turn it upside down. Sometimes we had to stop and reorient. But we got around—motorways to country lanes—by looking for and using landmarks.

Hiking required an OS (Ordnance Survey) map, map-reading skills, and a compass. You had to stop, open out the very large map, fold it to your current position, and work out where you were—and where you were going.

Then we started using a GPS system and quite quickly stopped noticing landmarks. We listened instead to a pleasant voice guiding us—or berating us—when we took a wrong turn.

Suddenly, we had outsourced an entire set of skills—and stopped noticing the world around us.

Now we outsource cooking to food delivery, financial thinking to advisors, and health to institutions.

Agency doesn’t disappear suddenly.
It erodes through small abdications.

The problem is not that we lose skills.

It is that, slowly and almost imperceptibly, we step out of our own lives.

Decisions are made elsewhere.
Thinking is done for us.
Participation becomes optional.

What is Agency?

Agency is the will to acquire, maintain and use the capabilities needed to live a full and rich life.

It is not independence in the heroic sense.
It is participation in one’s own life.

Agency and its Partner: Capability

However, Agency without capability becomes wishful thinking.
Capability without agency becomes unused potential.

When I trained as an adult-learning teacher, we were taught that our responsibility was to ensure students could demonstrate knowledge or skills.

In other words, they had developed capability.

What they chose to do with that knowledge was up to them.

That was agency.

Life works much the same way.

Small capabilities allow continued participation in life.

Aging and the Risk to Agency

Our cultural script suggests that aging means handing things over.

But the risk is this—as capability shrinks, agency follows.

Aging well may not be about preserving youth.
It may be about preserving agency.

What Remaining an Agent Looks Like

Remaining an agent means deliberately choosing to maintain physical and cognitive capabilities—and, more importantly, to continue participating in decisions about your life and health.

An agent participates.
A passenger waits to be told what to do.

Agency is not something we either have or don’t have.
It is something we either exercise—or slowly lose.

To remain an agent in your life is to remain awake to it.

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