Between Choice and Constraint

on agency, liberty, and the quiet narrowing of options

A collaborative essay.
An inquiry into agency, written between three conversations.

At what point does tool become collaborator?

There are moments when choice presents itself cleanly.
And there are moments when it doesn’t.

A friend, old and worn, decided he was done living.
Not in despair. Not in panic. He simply refused to continue. The machines were turned off. He died soon after.

It wasn’t suicide. He fought long and hard, for years. With hope. But there comes a time when we are no longer fighting to live, but prolonging death.

He made a choice.

That distinction matters, because what unsettles us isn’t death itself, but agency exercised where we would rather not see it. When there is no villain to blame, no system to reform, no lever to pull that might make the outcome feel deserved, or preventable.

We prefer agency when it looks like resilience.
We struggle with it when it looks like refusal.

That was never really a piece about death, or AI, or ethics at the end of life. It was about what remains when options narrow and there is no intervention. About what agency looks like when it cannot be saved, softened, or redirected.

A few days later, the opposite condition appeared.

Not too few choices, but far too many pressures.

A sleepless morning. News feeds, financial alerts, geopolitical warnings, housing markets, debt curves, automation, employment data, energy fears. All of it plausible. Accumulating. Accretions, barnacles on the soul slowing motion, deflating joy.

Constraint doesn’t always arrive by force.
Sometimes it arrives by volume.

Agency erodes quietly when every decision depends on variables no one controls. When we stop asking what should I do and start asking what’s even left that won’t collapse under me.

In this state, no one takes our agency.
We hand it over in pieces to systems, narratives, institutions, not out of ignorance, but to survive. Bit by bit. Day by day. In the hope that someone else has already planned for this.

It isn’t hysteria.
It’s exhaustion.

Over decades, certain words gather weight. They absorb our hopes and begin to signal progress simply by being spoken aloud. Paradigm once did this. Existential followed.

Lately, the word that keeps resurfacing is “agency.” Perhaps it stands out now because it has become literal.

Being named the personal representative of a friend who has died means, quite literally, acting as the agent for a dead man. Carrying out wishes. Paying bills. Protecting assets. Making decisions for someone who no longer exists.

At the same time, trusted readers describe this writing as being about agency, whether that was ever the intent or not.

Then the word migrated again.

AI systems are now described as agentic. They act on our behalf. They clean up messes, automate tasks, remove friction, absorb the less pleasant work of daily life.

They become our agents.

Language bleeds like watercolor. Agency lends tint to responsibility. Responsibility shades liberty. Liberty once meant something relatively plain: having authority over one’s own actions while recognizing that others have authority over theirs. Our legal systems rest on that assumption. Liberalism once centered on it.

But labels are plastic. They morph.

The defense of liberty has, in many places, become intolerance of other people’s right to speak or even believe their own truths. That does not mean all viewpoints are equal. Of course they aren’t. But the right to hold a viewpoint once stood as a cornerstone of liberty, not a threat to it.

Here lies a paradox.

Diversity strengthens ecosystems. It promotes creativity in communities, resilience in crops, adaptability in life itself. And yet, when diversity becomes a mandate, when it is codified, enforced, and moralized, it begins to erode the very liberty that allows diversity to exist.

The effort to legislate difference reduces it.
Agency thins.

As someone who believes diversity is strength, it is hard to know where that leaves us. But there we are.

Alternative Intelligence may liberate us, or it may enslave us, not because it is malicious but because it is efficient. Giving AI meaningful agency over our lives means surrendering agency we once believed was ours. Agency fought for by serfs, by slaves, by all disenfranchised. Agency tied to human responsibility, not convenience.

And yet the pressure to outsource it is real.

When options disappear, agency feels cruel.
When options overwhelm, agency feels impossible.

And now there is a third condition.

Not the loss of choice.
Not the overload of choice.
But the quiet separation of agency from responsibility.

We allow systems to act for us.
We allow agents to decide.
And eventually, no one remains who can be held accountable.

So we live between these conditions.

Between choice and constraint.
Between refusal and overload.
Between acting for ourselves and allowing systems to act for us.

We do not resolve that tension. We do not prescribe limits or propose safeguards. We do not suggest a rewind to some imagined past where things were simpler or kinder. We are not returning to the 1950s. Or the 1930s. Or any era we remember more fondly than it deserves.

We ask only for notice that agency is thinning, bending, or being quietly handed off, sometimes willingly, sometimes out of fatigue, sometimes because the alternative feels worse.

The danger is not that we lose agency all at once.
It is that we stop noticing when it leaves.

Erik Dolson / Mariah Faith Continelli (The New Unhinged)

Credits
This piece is hosted by The New Unhinged and written in collaboration with Erik Dolson, building on Erik’s essays That Final Choice · Triggered · Agent for a Dead Man

Erik writes from lived experience and moral inquiry.
Mariah holds framing, structure, and connective analysis.