On structure versus agency

 One of the things that you learn early on in life is that hard work will get you places, and that hard work will be everything you need to get ahead in life. Right, so that's complete and utter bullshit. Because honestly, at the end of the day, hard work will get you places, but how far you get to go will depend on your starting point.

A couple of days ago, I was asked to write a reaction to this video by a life coach in the US. Now, this won't be the first life coach I've worked with (insomuch as I wrote the piece with the intention of criticizing the lessons being pushed by the man) thus far, and it probably won't be the last, but something I've noticed with many life coaches, gurus, life experts, et cetera, is that they take the attitude that the world is your oyster, and the sky is the limit. The only thing limiting your level of achievement is your drive and ambition. So keep dreaming higher! Keep that fire burning, and don't let the hustle stop! The future is your playground, and if you keep hustling, you'll get to your pot of gold at the end of the rainbow eventually.

Would that all of that was true. One of the comic strips that went somewhat viral recently, in my part of the world at least, is a strip from The Woke Salaryman that discussed the differences between structure versus agency of a person. I won't talk about that excellent strip here as you're better off reading it for yourself via this link, but the gist of it is that you shouldn't undermine your progress just because it doesn't look like the progress that other people similar to you have achieved. This is because of the limiting nature of structure that hampers the agency of an individual's free will. That is to say, you only have as much free will as your current circumstances can give you. 

What does this mean? Well, let's use this shoeshine boy my family used to hire as an example. Pipi, as he was known, was a mute (and by the time I was old enough to understand things, old) guy who went around the town I live in to shine shoes. You would hear him coming down the street from a figurative mile away because of his trademark bleats. Due to his disability, Pipi would announce his presence by making the only sound his vocal structure can produce: sheep-like bleats. So if you started hearing sheep, then it was time to get your kicks in a row because Pipi was there and it was time to get your shoes cleaned. It was a simpler time, and Filipinos are well-meaning and well-intentioned but unnaturally cruel.

Now, Pipi made a living out of shining these shoes. He probably had support from a member of a family one way or the other, but for the most part, he was able to make it day by day with this job. People loved their shoes, and as I said earlier, it was a much simpler time with much simpler inflation rates. But one of the things you would notice about Pipi was that his clothes were always really dirty, and he was always dusty. Not that he was wearing rags, mind you; I'd seen him wearing everything from a t-shirt to a buttoned-up polo while he was on duty. The guy knew how to look decent, but he just never looked...clean, for want of a better word. Now, you could argue that this was probably because he was going around town on his own two feet, and he was literally removing dust from other peoples' shoes for a living, both of which make sense. But anybody with even a morsel of smarts would figure out ways to make sure he was able to present himself better eventually. Maybe buy a bike to make the door-to-door process easier. Get new clothes from time to time. Maybe even invest in some laundry soap. 

But Pipi never did. And from what I remember of him, it was not because he was not smart in any way. He always seemed bright-eyed whenever he would arrive at the house, and if he had the capacity to speak, I'm sure he would have had some crazy stories to tell his customers whenever he arrived at their doorstep. He would have been a cleaning and a show in one. And he never wanted for industriousness. Pipi worked hard during the days that we saw him, and he made sure our shoes were really clean afterward. And I'm sure we weren't his only customers around. But despite that, he was never able to improve his lot in life, at least in any demonstrable way that I saw while he was still working. He knew his agency, and he was self-governing his agency to the fullness of his capacity. But his structure hampered him from improving from where he was. To his mind, he had already achieved the pinnacle of what he wanted to achieve. He was working hard, and he had regular repeat customers. He ate regularly, had decent-ish clothes (I play around loosely with that term), and I would assume he had a roof over his head.

Could he have achieved more? In his mind, given the fact that he was a disabled person doing manual labor back in the 1980s and 1990s Manila, it was possible, but highly unlikely. Pinoys back then was very self-conscious of what people had to look like in order to be properly accepted into society. People with disabilities were often shunned and cast off to one side, like lepers, because they were out of the norm that other folks had become used to. And the fact that he was a  disabled minimum wage worker made it even worse. The fact that he was enterprising enough to set up a business of sorts for himself, and hard-working enough to do it well on a regular basis, wouldn't have mattered much, because he was in a level of society that didn't know better. Middle-class families loved him because he was a character and he did good work, and they could afford him. Lower-class families saw him as one of their own. The upper crust, on the other hand, would have seen him as a service provider and nothing more. The more matapobres of the lot, the noveau riche, would even have shunned his services because they might ruin their new Rusty Lopezes. 

So while his agency set him up for an unknown potential of success, Pipi's structure - the things he had no control over - kept him pigeonholed into his current lot in life. And that's what a lot of these gurus and life coaches don't address. Sometimes, you're just stuck in a position that keeps you from achieving. Granted, their lessons and insights can, indeed, help you become a better version of your current self, but up until you find a way to break free from your structure - be it yourself, society, or nature - what you might be able to achieve with what these guys have to teach you might not be the same thing that they've achieved. Maybe you'll end up ensuring that you get a regular stream of income, as opposed to somebody getting a revenue stream in the hundred thousands or even millions. You can't ever be sure. 

Now, since what you're going to achieve is limited by stuff you can't do anything about, does this mean that you should stop trying? No, of course not. You will never know what you might be capable of achieving up until you go and apply yourself fully to whatever it is that you do. And sometimes, your agency might lead you to strokes of fortune that completely upends your current structure. You'll never know until you try, as the old saying goes. But the whole point here is that just because you're not on a yacht spending money like it was water on a tap doesn't mean that you're not getting somewhere. It just might take you longer to get there. So don't ever sell yourself short. Life's a marathon, not a race.