Confidence Culture

But after thirty minutes of talk we’d uncovered overthinking, people pleasing, and an inability to let go of defeats—three traits we had already realized belonged on a confidence blacklist.

The opposite of agency is learned helplessness. If people believe that we can’t do very much to stop the world’s problems, it’s unsurprising that they’d be terrified to bring children into the world. But this seems like a mental trap that we can, and should, teach people to resist falling into. As  Clare Coffey writes  in “Failure to Cop

If our social attitudes towards agency are as important as they seem, we should measure its prevalence in the general population, then find ways to track it over time. I grew up in the heady halcyon days of globalism, where celebrities sang “We Are the World” [ 3 ] and Whitney Houston proclaimed that  “I believe the children are our future.”