What the ancients knew about agency.

tl;dr: You are not broken. The ancient Greeks and Vedic sages knew what we’ve forgotten: freedom isn’t controlling outcomes. It’s aligning action with purpose while releasing attachment to results.

The Burden of the Self-Made Self

Contemporary culture tells us a seductive story: you are the author of your life. Your happiness is a project. Your anxiety is a configuration error. With the right routine, the right app, the right therapeutic breakthrough, you can optimise yourself into contentment.

There’s something appealing about this narrative. It offers agency. It promises that the levers of your wellbeing are within reach. But there’s a shadow side worth examining: when everything is your responsibility, every failure becomes your fault. The job didn’t work out? You didn’t network enough. The relationship ended? You have attachment issues. You’re exhausted and anxious? You haven’t done the work.

This isn’t entirely wrong. Personal responsibility matters. But it’s radically incomplete. And in its incompleteness, it can trap us in cycles of self-blame for circumstances we never fully controlled.

To find a more spacious view, we might look to traditions that thought carefully about the architecture of human agency. Traditions that have been stress-tested across millennia. The ancient Greeks and the Vedic philosophers of India, writing worlds apart, arrived at remarkably convergent insights about what it means to act well in a world we don’t control.

Why Take Ancient Philosophy Seriously?

Before diving in, a reasonable question: why should a modern reader, particularly one immersed in technology, empiricism, and the cutting edge, care what people thought thousands of years ago?

Three reasons.

First, these aren’t religious texts in the narrow sense. The Bhagavad Gītā, while sacred to Hindus, is fundamentally a philosophical dialogue about action, duty, and the nature of self. It has been seriously engaged by thinkers from Thoreau and Emerson to Aldous Huxley and Robert Oppenheimer. T.S. Eliot called it “the greatest philosophical poem.” The text makes arguments, not just assertions, and those arguments can be evaluated on their merits.

Second, we already build from Greek philosophy (though may not realise it). Concepts like eudaimonia (flourishing), Stoic acceptance, and Aristotelian virtue ethics are mainstream in psychology, business, and self-help. The Vedic tradition offers equally sophisticated frameworks that happen to be less familiar in the West. There’s no principled reason to engage with Plato but not with the Upanishads.

Third, these traditions have been empirically tested by time. The Gītā has been a practical guide for navigating ethical complexity for over two thousand years. It has helped people face war, loss, moral ambiguity, and the ordinary difficulties of living. That kind of durability isn’t proof, but it is evidence worth considering.

What I’m proposing isn’t a return to ancient social structures or religious observance. It’s extracting philosophical technology: frameworks for understanding agency, action, and meaning that remain useful when translated into contemporary terms.

The Illusion of the Doer

The Vedic tradition identifies a particular cognitive trap: Ahaṅkāra, often translated as “ego” but more precisely meaning the false sense of being the independent author of all one’s actions. The Bhagavad Gītā (3.27) puts it sharply:

“All actions are performed by the modes of material nature. But the one deluded by ego thinks: ‘I am the doer.’”

This isn’t a claim that we have no agency. The Gītā is fundamentally about how to act. Rather, it’s an observation that we systematically overestimate our authorship. We didn’t choose our genes, our early environment, our historical moment, or most of the circumstances that shape our possibilities. To pretend otherwise isn’t confidence; it’s a kind of confusion.

The Greeks had their own name for this confusion: hubris, the belief that one can outsmart the cosmic order. Oedipus doesn’t suffer because he made poor choices; he suffers because he was fated to, despite his best efforts to escape. The tragedy isn’t that he failed to optimise; it’s that some things aren’t optimisable.

Recognising this doesn’t make us passive. It makes us realistic about what we actually control, which turns out to be a narrower but more actionable domain than the “self-help” model suggests.

A Clarification: Therapy Isn’t the Target

I want to be precise here. This isn’t a critique of therapy or mental health treatment. Good therapeutic frameworks already embody much of what the ancients understood:

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) explicitly distinguishes what we can control from what we cannot.

Cognitive-behavioural approaches teach reframing that parallels the Gītā‘s teaching on non-attachment to outcomes.

Mindfulness-based practices draw directly from Buddhist and Vedic contemplative traditions.

The issue isn’t clinical practice. It’s what we might call therapeutic culture: the broader assumption that all suffering is individual pathology, that if you’re struggling, something is wrong with you specifically.

Mark Fisher identified this pattern precisely: when depression gets “privatised,” what might be a rational response to precarious employment, algorithmic manipulation, or the collapse of community gets reframed as your brain chemistry, your maladaptive patterns, your failure to practise gratitude.

The ancients offer a corrective: a framework that locates the self within a larger ecology (cosmic, social, material) where individual suffering is not merely a bug to be patched but a signal about conditions that may require collective response.

The Chariot: An Alternative Model of Mind

Both the Greek and Vedic traditions use the same striking metaphor to explain human psychology: the chariot.

In the Vedic version (Kaṭha Upaniṣad 1.3.3-4):

The passenger is the true Self (Ātman)

The chariot is the body

The driver is the Intellect (Buddhi)

The reins are the Mind (Manas)

The horses are the Senses

In Plato’s version (Phaedrus):

The Charioteer is Reason (Logos)

One horse represents spirited will (Thumos)

The other represents appetite and desire (Epithumia)

The synthesis: we are not unified selves but dynamic systems. The “synapse model”, where we’re essentially wetware to be debugged, misses the relational architecture. The horses aren’t problems to eliminate; their energy is what moves us. The question is whether anyone is holding the reins.

Much of modern life invites us to let the horses steer: following impulses, optimising for dopamine, reacting to algorithmic feeds. When the chariot inevitably veers, we blame the vehicle (bad genes, chemical imbalances) rather than noticing the empty driver’s seat.

Agency isn’t about suppressing the horses. It’s about taking the reins.

Flourishing Over Pleasure

Here’s a fundamental divergence from contemporary assumptions: the ancients didn’t think the goal of life was to feel good. They thought it was to be good.

The Greeks distinguished hedonia (pleasure) from eudaimonia (flourishing, living well). The Vedic tradition distinguishes preyas (the pleasant) from śreyas (the good). In both cases, the pleasant is immediate and often easy; the good is harder and more lasting.

Consider Lord Rāma in the Rāmāyaṇa. On the eve of his coronation, his father (bound by an old promise) exiles him to the forest for fourteen years (with profound sadness; while honouring the promise). A contemporary framing might focus on Rāma’s need to “set boundaries” or “advocate for himself.”

Rāma does neither. He accepts the exile instantly. Not with resignation, but with clarity. Why?

Because his orientation wasn’t toward personal happiness. It was toward dharma: righteous action, cosmic alignment, the maintenance of order.

The Gītā (2.47) crystallises this:

“You have a right to action alone, never to its fruits. Let not the fruit of action be your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction.”

This is often misread as passivity. It’s the opposite: it’s a framework for sustained, courageous action. By separating what you do from what happens, you become free from the paralysing fear of failure. You can act boldly because you’re not hostage to outcomes you never controlled anyway.

The Return to the Collective

Perhaps the most damaging consequence of radical individualism is isolation. If my problems are just “my synapses,” I don’t need you. I need an app, a coach, a personal optimisation stack. We become isolated nodes, each running private debugging sessions.

The Gītā offers a different orientation: Loka-saṅgraha, literally “holding the world together.” Krishna advises Arjuna to act not for personal glory or even personal liberation, but to set a standard for others:

“As the wise act without attachment, so should they act for the welfare of the world.” (3.25)

How does this differ from contemporary activism? Modern movements demonstrate that collective action remains possible. The difference is psychological posture and sustainability.

Outcome-attached activism burns out. We march to win, organise to pass the bill, protest to change minds. When the bill fails or the election is lost, defeat feels personal because the self remained at the centre.

Loka-saṅgraha inverts this. You act because it’s your dharma to act, because the act itself maintains something larger than you. The outcome belongs to the field of fate; your jurisdiction is the action alone.

This isn’t passivity. It’s sustainable intensity. It’s what allowed people to face fire hoses in the civil rights movement: not because they didn’t care about outcomes, but because their identity wasn’t staked on controlling them.

The Charioteer in the Age of AI

There’s a contemporary domain where this framework becomes urgently practical: working with artificial intelligence.

AI systems introduce a peculiar form of the “doer” illusion. When you prompt an LLM, who is acting? The output feels like yours. You directed it, you’ll use it, your name goes on it. But you didn’t write those words. You’re in a collaboration where authorship is genuinely distributed.

This creates a version of Ahaṅkāra (ego) at the system level. We can fall into thinking we’re the sole authors of work that emerged from human-AI interaction, or conversely, that we bear no responsibility for outputs we merely “prompted.”

The charioteer metaphor offers guidance here, but it demands something of us. In human-AI collaboration, you remain the driver. The AI is something like the horses: powerful, capable of covering ground you couldn’t alone, but requiring direction. Letting the horses steer (accepting whatever the AI produces uncritically) leads to the same crashes as in the original metaphor.

But here’s what the metaphor also implies: holding the reins is a skill. And skill requires cultivation.

The Craft of Collaboration

Working effectively with AI systems is not a matter of finding the right prompt template or memorising tricks. It requires genuine competence that must be earned through practice. This includes the ability to decompose problems clearly, to evaluate outputs against standards you can articulate, to iterate without losing sight of the goal, and to know when the tool is helping versus when it’s leading you astray.

These capacities don’t arrive automatically. They require consistent effort, discipline, continuous learning, and reflection ~ and most critically, a deep understanding of the domain and context within while the AIs powers have been summoned into. They require intellectual humility: the willingness to recognise when you’ve prompted poorly, when your mental model of the system is wrong, when the AI has surfaced something better than what you imagined.

The ancient frameworks speak directly to this. Dharma isn’t just about doing your duty; it’s about cultivating the discernment (Buddhi) to know what your duty actually is in a given moment. The charioteer doesn’t merely hold the reins. The charioteer has trained for years to read the horses, to feel the terrain through the wheels, to make micro-adjustments that keep the vehicle on course.

There is a confidence that emerges from this kind of mastery. Not the false confidence of someone who believes they can control outcomes, but the grounded confidence of someone who trusts their own judgement, their ability to navigate uncertainty, their capacity to recover from mistakes. This confidence cannot be borrowed or downloaded. It must be built through deliberate practice and honest self-assessment.

Tolerating Probabilistic Systems

AI systems are fundamentally probabilistic. They will fail in ways you cannot fully predict. The same prompt may yield different results. Edge cases will surprise you. Hallucinations slip through. No amount of skill eliminates this variability; it can only be managed to a limit.

This is where the Gītā‘s teaching on non-attachment becomes remarkably practical. If you’re psychologically attached to a specific result, you’ll either force it (overriding the AI’s genuine contributions) or be frustrated by the inherent unpredictability. You’ll experience each failure as a personal affront, or categorise it as confusion of the machine ~ missing the critical value of the information carried by each failure or error.

The alternative is a kind of equanimity toward stochastic systems. You commit fully to the process: clear intention, careful prompting, thoughtful evaluation. You hold the specific output loosely. When the system fails, you adjust and continue. When it succeeds, you don’t over-attribute to your own brilliance.

This isn’t resignation. It’s the sustainable intensity we discussed earlier, applied to a new domain. The skilled practitioner makes progress through the variability, not by pretending it doesn’t exist. They develop an intuition for when to trust, when to verify, when to override, and when to try a different approach entirely.

The paradox is that accepting the limits of control actually increases your effectiveness. You stop fighting the nature of the system and start working with it. Your energy goes into the variables you can influence (your own skill, your prompts, your evaluation criteria, learning from error of failure modalities) rather than into frustration at variables you cannot.

The Collective Dimension

And there’s a larger frame here too. How we develop, deploy, and integrate AI systems is a form of Loka-saṅgraha, a kind of world-maintenance. The individual choices of researchers, engineers, and users aggregate into a civilisational trajectory.

The skills we cultivate matter not just for our own productivity but for the patterns we establish, the norms we model, the collective competence we build or erode. Acting with awareness of that larger fabric, rather than purely individual optimisation, may be the most important application of ancient wisdom to our current moment.

The charioteer who masters the reins doesn’t do so for personal glory alone. They do so because the journey matters, because others are watching and learning, because the road ahead requires many skilled drivers.

The Rajasic Trap

There is a darker possibility we must name. The ancients of the east describes three guṇas (qualities) that drive action: sattva (clarity, harmony), rajas (passion, ambition, restlessness), and tamas (inertia, delusion). AI systems, with their intoxicating speed and leverage, are potent amplifiers of rajas. The rapid dopamine hits of accelerated productivity can inflate the ego precisely when humility is most needed. “Look how productive I am now” becomes a dangerous thought when it obscures the distributed, probabilistic, and fundamentally uncontrollable nature of what you’re wielding.

This is the path toward what game theorists call Moloch: the demon of coordination failure, the god of races to the bottom, the force that devours participants in competitive systems even as each acts “rationally.” When AI becomes a tool primarily for coercion, manipulation, wealth concentration, and power accumulation, we are not building anything. We are feeding something. And that something has an appetite that grows with what it consumes. What starts are small data centres can easily take the form of the dark worlds that Tolkein paints in this Lord of the Rings trilogies.

The Gītā speaks of āsura (demonic) tendencies: the pursuit of power and pleasure untethered from dharma, the delusion that one is the supreme agent, the disregard for the fabric that holds the world together. These tendencies have always existed. What changes with AI is velocity. The feedback loops that once took decades to play out (robber barons consolidating, ecosystems collapsing, institutions hollowing) may now complete in years or months. The system can devour its creators before they recognise what they’ve built.

Without the Greek sense of hubris and its consequences, without the Vedic teaching of Loka-saṅgraha, without genuine humility about what we control and what controls us, the chariot becomes a war machine. And war machines, as the Mahābhārata teaches us, destroy victors and vanquished alike. The speed that AI provides is morally neutral. It accelerates whatever intent drives it. The question is whether the charioteer has cultivated the wisdom to match the power of the horses, or whether the horses are simply running faster toward the cliff.

The Objection: Different Times, Different Needs?

A fair reader will note that the ancient world was no utopia. Heroic fatalism worked differently if you were Achilles than if you were a helot or slave. I’m not romanticising ancient societies.

What I am doing is extracting philosophical frameworks, technology, that can be separated from their social contexts. The chariot metaphor, the distinction between action and outcome, the concept of dharma, the idea of Loka-saṅgraha: these are tools for thinking about agency that don’t require ancient social structures.

We already do this with Greek philosophy routinely. The Stoics owned slaves; we still find value in Stoic ethics. Aristotle defended social hierarchies we rightly reject; his analysis of eudaimonia remains illuminating. The same charitable extraction is warranted for Vedic thought.

Take what is living. Leave what is not.

Dharmic Realism: A Practical Framework

What would it mean to take these ideas seriously? Four principles:

1. Accept Constraints

Acknowledge that fate, nature, and material conditions are stronger than individual will. This isn’t defeat. It’s the foundation of sanity. You didn’t choose your birth, your body, your historical moment. To pretend otherwise is the delusion the ancients warned against.

2. Resign from Results

Act with total intensity, but psychologically release the outcome. Pour everything into the work; hold nothing of yourself hostage to what happens next. This defuses fear: if you’re not identified with success, you cannot be destroyed by failure.

3. Pursue Flourishing, Not Comfort

Replace “Does this make me happy?” with “Does this make me excellent? Does this align with my purpose? Does this contribute to something larger?”

4. Locate Yourself in the Collective

You are not an isolated node. Your actions ripple. When you act for Loka-saṅgraha (holding the world together) the anxious focus on personal outcomes naturally loosens.

The Storm and the Reins

We are not synapses to be hacked or algorithms to be optimised. We are not “selves” to be sovereign over a domain that was never ours to rule.

We are charioteers in a storm.

The storm is not your fault. You didn’t create the economic precarity, the attention economy, the loneliness epidemic, or the collapse of meaning-making institutions. These are vast, impersonal forces: the winds of Daiva, as the tradition would say.

But when the horses bolt and the wheels shake, you have a choice. You can curse the weather. You can blame the chariot. You can spend your life optimising the axle grease while careening toward the cliff.

Or you can grip the reins.

The ancients knew which choice leads somewhere. Not to a destination you control (the road belongs to fate) but to a way of travelling worthy of the journey.

The storm rages. The horses are wild. The driver’s seat is empty.

It’s yours if you want it.

References

Vedic Sources

Bhagavad Gītā, particularly chapters 2, 3, and 18. Translations by Eknath Easwaran (accessible) or Winthrop Sargeant (scholarly) recommended.

Kaṭha Upaniṣad 1.3.3-4 (the chariot metaphor)

Rāmāyaṇa (the exile of Rāma)

Mahābhārata (the broader epic containing the Gītā)

Greek Sources

Plato, Phaedrus (the chariot of the soul)

Homer, Iliad (Achilles’ withdrawal and return)

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (eudaimonia and virtue)

Contemporary

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books, 2009.

Hayes, Steven C. A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters. Avery, 2019. (For ACT’s connection to acceptance traditions)

Key Sanskrit Terms

Ahaṅkāra: False ego; the illusory sense of being the independent doer

Āsura: Demonic; tendencies toward power and pleasure untethered from dharma

Ātman: The true Self

Buddhi: Intellect, discernment

Daiva: Fate, divine dispensation

Dharma: Righteous duty, cosmic order, proper action

Eudaimonia (Greek): Flourishing, living well

Guṇas: The three fundamental qualities that drive action (sattva, rajas, tamas)

Loka-saṅgraha: World-maintenance, acting for collective welfare

Manas: Mind

Moira (Greek): Fate

Preyas: The pleasant (immediate gratification)

Rajas: Passion, ambition, restlessness; one of the three guṇas

Sattva: Clarity, harmony, balance; one of the three guṇas

Śreyas: The good (ultimate welfare)

Tamas: Inertia, delusion, darkness; one of the three guṇas