Interpretive Frame
This essay explores disruption not as a personal anomaly or moral failure, but as a patterned condition of human life shaped by history, culture, and systems. By examining how agency and ethics are reconfigured through disruption, it reframes becoming as an ongoing practice rather than a stable possession.
Disruption is often experienced as rupture: a break in the story we tell about who we are, where we belong, and what we can reasonably expect from the world. Serious illness, the loss of a relationship, economic precarity, leaving a faith tradition, or the slow erosion of professional identity can unsettle the coherence of a life that once felt intelligible. At the same time, collective disruptions—pandemics, political instability, technological acceleration, climate anxiety—reshape the conditions under which personal lives unfold.
Yet disruption is commonly framed as misfortune, exception, or failure. We speak as though stability were the norm and upheaval an intrusion. This framing encourages the search for explanations rooted in fate, divine intervention, moral deserts, or sheer bad luck. Something must have gone wrong. Someone must be to blame. Or, alternatively, something larger—gods, destiny, the universe—must eventually set things right.
This way of thinking misreads both the self and the world. Disruption is not a deviation from normal life. It is one of the primary ways lives reorganize.
Disruption as Pattern, Not Exception
Across personal histories and collective timelines, periods of relative coherence are repeatedly interrupted by events that expose the fragility of identity and expectation. Careers no longer unfold linearly. Bodies age, weaken, or change in ways that cannot be willed away. Social norms shift, sometimes faster than individuals can integrate. What once felt stable becomes provisional.
Seen this way, disruption is not merely something that happens to individuals. It is patterned by culture and history. Certain disruptions cluster in particular eras. Economic systems generate insecurity unevenly. Political arrangements amplify uncertainty for some groups while insulating others. Cultural narratives tell us which disruptions are tragic, which are deserved, and which should be quietly endured.
The idea that the self should remain intact through all of this—that identity is something possessed and maintained—rests on a false assumption. Selves are not static objects. They are ongoing processes, continuously reorganized in response to changing conditions.
When disruption occurs, it does not erase agency. It exposes how agency has always been exercised: within constraint, through interpretation, and across multiple dimensions of life at once.
Agency Across Intersecting Dimensions
Agency is often imagined as something an individual either has or loses. In moments of disruption, people speak of feeling powerless, adrift, or acted upon. While these experiences are real, they obscure a more complex reality: agency does not disappear during disruption; it moves.
At the phenomenological level, disruption alters how life is felt. Time may contract or stretch. Memory is reorganized around before-and-after markers. The future becomes harder to imagine. Agency here may appear minimal, reduced to endurance or small acts of care.
At the cultural level, disruption collides with shared stories about resilience, faith, success, or progress. Narratives such as “everything happens for a reason” or “good things come to those who try hard enough” offer comfort, but they also shape how responsibility and blame are distributed.
At the behavioral level, agency becomes visible in what people do next: what they repeat, resist, abandon, or attempt to rebuild. Even in constrained circumstances, responses accumulate into patterns that matter.
At the systems level, disruption reveals the structures that enable some responses while foreclosing others. Access to healthcare, social support, legal recognition, or economic stability profoundly shapes what forms of agency are possible.
Agency moves through all of these dimensions simultaneously. It is not located in one place. It is not a possession. It is practiced.
The Return of the Gods
In times of disruption, older logics reassert themselves. The language of gods and fate may sound archaic, but its structure persists in secular forms. We speak of karma, manifestation, destiny, or “the universe.” We tell ourselves that suffering will be redeemed if only we endure correctly, believe sufficiently, or maintain the right attitude.
These narratives are understandable. They emerge from fear, desperation, and a desire for coherence. But they also perform an important cultural function: they relieve individuals and societies of responsibility. If disruption is governed by cosmic bookkeeping, then ethical action becomes optional. Waiting replaces working. Hope substitutes for commitment.
The danger is not belief itself, but what belief displaces. When ethics is reduced to intention, prayer, or positivity, it becomes superstition—an appeal to forces beyond human responsibility. The work of responding to disruption is deferred to the gods, whether named or not.
Ethics as Work, Not Assurance
Ethics, properly understood, is not a set of rules or a posture of purity. It is work. It is the deliberate practice of responding to disruption in ways that seek integrity, relational accountability, and shared flourishing.
There is an older understanding embedded in the notion of work itself: ethical life is not something one declares; it is something one does. Insight does not complete the task. Reflection does not absolve responsibility. The measure of ethics lies in action—especially when action is difficult, costly, or uncertain.
Wholeness, in this sense, is not a private achievement. It is an orientation toward unity within oneself and with the interconnected world. Ethics becomes the practical expression of that orientation. It is how the desire for wholeness takes shape in concrete responses—responses that recognize interdependence rather than deny it.
Disruption tests this orientation. It asks whether ethics will remain aspirational or become enacted.
Becoming Without Guarantees
Disruption does not promise growth. Suffering does not automatically yield wisdom. What disruption does offer is a reconfiguration of possibility. Old narratives lose their authority. New interpretations become available. Agency, redistributed across personal, cultural, behavioral, and systemic dimensions, can be practiced differently.
The task is not to restore a previous self or to wait for external resolution. It is to engage the work of becoming within uncertainty—to act ethically without guarantees, to take responsibility without certainty of outcome.
Agency is not something we possess and then lose. It is something we practice, again and again, under changing conditions. Ethics is not a belief we hold. It is the work through which wholeness is sought, not as perfection, but as alignment between understanding and action.
In unstable times, the question is not whether disruption will come. It already has. The question is how we will participate—individually and collectively—in what comes next.
How to cite this article
Green, R. K. (2025). Disrupting the self: Agency, ethics, and the work of becoming in unstable times. The Emergent Self. https://theemergentself.com/disrupting-the-self-agency-ethics-and-the-work-of-becoming-in-unstable-times/
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