But there is a balancing that needs to occur.
You don’t want to be completely caught up in the impulsivity of your embodiment or your reflective metacognition, because both undermine agency.

You don’t want to be a Wanton…or Hamlet.
Let me explain…

If you just act completely impulsively (this is Harry Frankfurt’s notion of a “Wanton”) you’ll actually lose your agency because your impulses are often in conflict with each other…they undermine each other.

So what you need to do is you need to step back and reflect.

See, when you’re enmeshed in a perspective you’re enmeshed in its salience landscape…how it’s making you care, how it’s motivating and arousing you.

So when you’re thirsty, you’re seeing the world "thirstily":
Things having to do with water become salient and you’re drawn to them.
That’s to see the world "thirstily".

But you can actually step to a different perspective in which you’re aware of your thirst.

This perspective (for example) is curious:
“Oh, that’s what thirst is like!”

Now your motivational machinery is not driven just by thirst.
It is driven by (perhaps) curiosity…and what happens is that you start to gain some relief from the compulsion of immediacy and urgency of your thirst.

You get a gap by reflection.

But as you may expect, you can’t simply maximize this.

It’s an excellent point from Velleman:
As you open up this reflectiveness gap, you’re gaining agency.
But if you keep opening it up, do you keep enhancing your agency?

No, because then you get into the problem that is typified in one of the great tragedies, namely Hamlet.

Hamlet is always reflecting and he’s always reflecting on his reflection.
He’s always stepping back and looking at…so much that he becomes incapable of acting.

He becomes disconnected from the motivational machinery of interacting with the world.
He loses his agency.

That means as you open up your reflectiveness gap, you gain agency…but as you push it too far, you lose it.

Now you may be tempted to say “Oh, I’ll just stay in the middle.” but that never works because how much you need to be towards this end and how much you need to be towards that end is going to be very contextually sensitive.

So this is non-dual (between the two):
You are both in the world and witnessing, but you are not lost in the view from nowhere or completely a Wanton.
They are dialogical…both ends are talking to each other.

The bottom layer of that is building existential resilience…which is the capacity to retain your agency in high states of arousal, conflict, and dysregulation.

It allows one to have an awareness of what is happening, while still developing the capacities to agentically navigate a conflict (or difficulty) across time.

It’s a measure of your ability to maintain meaning in life in the face of serious problems that are challenging your agency, personhood, and selfhood.

But there is a way in which existential resilience can become isolationist:
“Oh, I’m very resilient, therefore nobody can touch me.”

So it calls into question: You develop existential resilience for what?

That’s the orientation towards eudaimonia…like, what is the good life?

Which is exactly what an ecology of practices serves:
It bridges existential resilience to the good life.