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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from Patterns of Refactored Agency
  • Human agency, despite its familiarity, is beset by well-known problems. We are subject to Anomie and akrasia, to both overconfidence and crippling self-doubt. Psychologists have become adept at teasing out paradoxes of agency, such as that voluntary actions seem to start before we are aware of them, and that the startling number of false confessions to crimes shows we can easily be mistaken about our own agency. Freud and others since have dissected the unconscious and unintegrated goals that exist beneath the surface of everyday action. The model of the mind that emerges from these thinkers is that we are at our base bundles of autonomous and somewhat anarchic behaviors, tied together by higher-level functions that work on a kind of narrative basis – we hold ourselves together by telling stories about our actions, before and after the fact. But our tools for doing this are highly imperfect and limited. We are so conditioned to see ourselves as a unitary agent that the various malfunctions of our agency can be very troubling.
from Meaningness, Nihilism, and Me
  • The second is more genuine and stems not so much from rebellion but from the failure of meaning-generation. It’s something that can happen after subcultural rebellion has played out; it’s nihilism for older people. Its hallmarks are alienation, Anomie , Despair , and exhaustion. You find the theme addressed in modern art and literature (Beckett, Cioran, Delillo’s White Noise …I’ve been compiling a list .
Twin Pages

Anomie

18 Jan 2026 - 25 Jan 2026
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    • Aka the bad kind of goallessness. Negative relationship to agency, if not exactly the opposite.
    • Anomie - Wikipedia huh Durkheim has a social definition, I was thinking more the individual state but guess there isn't that much difference. Literally without law or norms, so also related to anarchy. I guess Acedia - Wikipedia might be a more individualistic term, but nobody knows that one.