Why following intuition is actually practical
Practicality
Thankfully/sadly, I’m an only child. I would have to take care of my parents and be the sole earner of the family (someday). If I get married, I will have to ensure my spouse’s security. If I have children, I would have to ensure they receive good education, health, and food. This adds another set of financial responsibilities. (No, I’m not misogynistic; my wife can work too, but I’m just putting forth a theory.) Essentially, as a young man, I have to make a lot of money; a fuck ton of it, otherwise, survival is impossible. (I am Indian, so family ties are stronger, I would say)
Philosophy
I am a living, breathing man, I have my own thoughts and values that I like to keep protected, I believe I should love what I do for a living and not just make money, I don’t believe in arranged marriages, religions, or traditional education systems, etc. Things would be much simpler if I loved making money and accepted societal norms (I’m not saying it’s wrong to accept any of those). But I am who I am, and sadly/thankfully, I won’t be able to accept them, ever. It would feel like I’m drinking poisoned water from a puddle with a dead-rotten cat in it.
So, the battle begins
What should I value the most? If I value practicality the most, I would be living a stable life but would be miserable inside. If I focus too much on philosophy, life would become solely my imagination, wasting it by living inside my head and not implementing anything, maybe even end up broke, not just me, but my entire family will perish. So when to make money and when not to? When to seek permission and when to blow out of the doors?
PS: This blog may not sound so scientific but it is not intended for those who are seeking spiritual answers either. So it has its own audience 🙂
Rationality is not fun
To be honest, I really don’t have much respect for those who are extremely calculated and analytical. Being pretentiously ‘curious’ and often scientific, it contradicts my logical arguments. But I still believe that following philosophy, which in turn, relies on intuition, is better than being analytical all the time, even if it doesn’t make sense! Let me explain…
Einstein was working in a patent office; he had a child and a wife to feed. A little-known fact is that Einstein struggled to find a job. But luckily, he found this position. So, as a ‘stable’ man, he would have done nothing but his 9-to-5 job and then left home with a salary! But what would have made him write four era-defining papers that changed the entire face of physics forever? General relativity, the photoelectric effect—these are not the things a patent officer thinks about; he never has to. But still, someone did.
An even lesser-known fact is about Leonardo Da Vinci. He had written more than seven thousand pages of journals before he died. These journals are filled with discoveries, from architecture to biology, from musical instruments to city planning, from sketches of a working heart to sketches of the Mona Lisa! But we all know he used to write in a mirrored version. He never published a single invention; the discoveries he made in his lifetime were far ahead of his time. He would’ve made millions (in those terms) and propelled humanity much faster if he had published them. But we found those journals only after a hundred and fifty years of his death. He never got the credit when he was alive, and perhaps he never wanted any. Heck, we all know him for the Mona Lisa, but he never sold that painting and kept perfecting it until the day he died. He would have made a ton of money for that painting for sure, but he never did. So why bother writing seven thousand pages of science and arts? Just for curiosity?
You don’t need to be a genius to follow intuition
When I tell these examples, people argue that these are extraordinary people with extremely smart brains, and we mere mortals should follow the path of practicality. But I disagree. There’s no denying that these individuals are extremely intelligent. But labeling them as geniuses is an insult to their curiosity and hard work. If they were just smart, they would have sat tight and done their jobs. It would have taken much less effort for them to perform daily chores than us mere mortals. But they still had something that made them put in thousands of hours of effort, and that too without any end goal in mind.
Intuition has no end goal
We have designed our society in a way that whatever we do, we need to have an end goal in mind. If you are appearing for exams, passing the exam or getting a rank would be the end goal. If you are getting paid for a job, getting a new home or car, or retiring early would be the end goal.
Scientists who work on the edge of knowledge know that whatever they are doing or working on for decades may not end up well or fulfill their dreams. The experiments fail 99% of the time. They say Edison failed 99 times before he perfected the bulb. So they are always resilient, antifragile to failure. They know how to fail better, they know how to deal with the uncertainty of the goal, they know how to keep curiosity going even when things are impractical. The end goal is not defined! It is driven mostly by curiosity! Yet it is purely logical, it is scientific!
This attitude is not just seen among scientists. It can be found in entrepreneurs, founders, self-learners… Just like Vikings didn’t know anything about the goal they had in mind, these seekers don’t have a proper goal. They just do things in the hope of reaching shore someday. So even if they don’t have a proper end goal, people do succeed, and we don’t need to be geniuses for it.
Following intuition is practical
So they say, follow your intuition. Following intuition is not just a philosophical term. It’s actually scientific (well, kinda). We have two parts of the brain, which we call the conscious brain and the unconscious brain. The conscious brain knows how to calculate things for you. The process and the results are transparent. If you want to learn how to play the piano, you will have to learn how to focus and press each key. But what makes you want to learn the piano in the first place? Because your friends do it? Or because you just felt like it? Maybe you will never know; maybe scientists won’t understand it.
We don’t have access to the unconscious brain; I mean, we can’t infer the result of it. The unconscious brain, which is often the intuitive mind, is untapped by science. We can’t see how it works because it’s too complex to understand, and so many parameters can affect it. (Maybe the reason you wanted to learn the piano is because you were shopping in a mall and they were playing Mozart in the background. You got the product you wanted at an extremely cheap price, and boom! that fit in as a happy moment in your brain along with the music. But later on, you forgot what was exactly the reason you felt happy, and you thought learning piano would make you feel that way again. This all happened unconsciously!)
It is widely known that Leonardo da Vinci left in his manuscripts many clues, rules, and knowledge about the consequences of friction and the methods to reduce it, the wear between the parts in contact, and the keys to reduce resistance to movement using the appropriate lubricants. This article aims to present an approximation about how some of the intuitive works of Leonardo, left in the sketches and notes in the codices, Codex Madrid I and the Codex Atlanticus, have been preserved and used to formulate theories, practices and the methods associated with present-day tribology.
Leonardo da Vinci’s tribological intuitions ScienceDirect
Sometimes practicality matters too
But there’s downside to following intuition too. Sometimes following intuition gets tricky; sometimes emotions take control of everything in our brains, and we make false decisions. We all know you bought that car because it ‘looks’ cool. Now it’s a nightmare because you have to service it every single week. Following intuition is not financially viable for financial stability, at least in the short term.
But just like I said, life should not be about seeking the balance, making everything right, and calculating every single step. Because even if we feel like we are trying to approach everything from a logical perspective, neuroscience differs in its proof. We don’t know what makes us do what we do. We are under the control of our unconscious mind almost all the time.
“If you focus too much on the outcome/results, you will never be able to create anything of your own”
How to strike balance between rationality and intuition
So, how do I strike the balance between philosophy and practicality? What should I follow, and how? Maybe this question is just wrong. There’s no answer to it because there’s no term as philosophy and practicality for our brain, so there’s no balance to find! Everything is similar for our brain, be it a thought or emotion. So there’s no point in wasting time trying to find the balance!
Conclusion
I don’t want my parents/wife/kids to suffer, yet I don’t want to suffer in my own life either! For very few, this isn’t even a question because they have already turned that battle into an engaging competition. Rather than fulfilling the external expectations, the things people want me to do for my family and in my career/life, I should be following my own internal desires. I don’t want to be broke, but I also don’t want to live a vapid life. I want to fulfill my ‘wants’ before my ‘needs’. Which is hard, but that’s what life is about, isn’t it?
Thanks for reading!
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