Planning is not prediction. Prediction generally gets monotonically harder with time. But planning gets easier because agency wanes andctgeres fewer meaningful things you can do the farther out you look.
A common pattern I've noticed in terms that are vulnerable to this pattern of concept creep and semantic decay is that they pick out attempts to create agency out of reifications, and there is some actual agency there. Just hard to pick out, acquire, and exercise well.
How do you know your attempt at semantic disruption is working? Two signs:
Social proof: people resonate wit your sense of usage. They train on, and add to, your use instances.
Material proof: navigating with that concept yields better-than-random results, ie it finds agency
I don’t think you can fight it, at least not alone. Logging and journaling don’t anchor long-term memory, you need creative live responses for that. Creative agency is memory and too many writers have experienced too deep a loss of agency.
This is what drives us crazy with cognitive dissonance. The wrong people being randomly better for *our* goals than right ones.
A universe with that kind of unpredictability in the basic causal chain of agency (values —> intentions —> actions —> outcomes) makes us feel helpless
Alice is actually a bit of a high-authoritah jerk like Cartman, crossed with a high-ADHD weirdo improv artist who just rolls with whatever. Alice in Wonderland is just one giant Yes, And to absurdity, navigating murdered time with high agency, but low meaningfulness.
The simplest heuristic I’ve found for this is actually unironic truth-telling. The truth never takes away agency, though it may sometimes puncture delusions of agency
Oddly enough, I was the least rebellious teenager ever. Simple open rejectionism is not actually much fun. Quiet, imaginative subversion of over-evangelized norms, served slightly chilled, is much better. That takes adult sensibilities/agency. Teens can't really pull that off.
Polytheism is a religion based on extending the default way of knowing we think of as “agency” for example. Knowing-by-becoming. Explaining things in terms of the transformational desires of agenty things.
Monotheism is based on knowing-by-being.