Why Your Intuition Might Be Wrong
And why you need to trust it anyway
I have always been the one to trust my instincts, trust my intuition, trust my feelings, trust my gut and all that stuff. I had a good amount of self-worth and I was confident with most of the decisions I made in my daily life.
Until I wasn’t.
My decisions were making me miserable. Things weren’t working out the way I wanted them to. The foundation of my life was crashing under the safe ground I built and I inevitably started doubting myself. My ability to trust myself was no longer there.
Why does this happen? Of course, it doesn’t happen all the time. Some people even navigate their whole life never facing this conundrum. But because I had to face this question, I also set myself to answer them and I did.
So, here we go.
Our desires are not in line with our values
I don’t want whatever I want.
Oh boy, how happy I could be if I could change what I want.
Have you ever had that overpowering urge to really want something and the whole universe just conspires against it? It happens.
But it’s not always the Universe at work, at least not entirely. It’s your value system that is prohibiting to continue down the path that is so alluring. It keeps knocking on your mind’s door saying, “Is this what you really want? This is kind of not in alignment with our values. Just putting it out there. Okay. Bye.”
And it disappears after that, no help whatsoever.
This is the time we pick ourselves up, decide what to compromise on and choose our battles consciously. Because there will always be a fight you have to put up with.
Our surroundings mould us accordingly, all the time
You are the sum of your five closest friends
Ironically, I learnt that from my friend.
To be honest, I am not the same person I was a year ago. None of us is. If you think you are, you’re wrong.
Our city, our circumstances, our friends, our financial status and a lot more is at work to shape your decisions. Although it might be a subconscious process, it still is a real thing.
In this case, our intuition changes and stops serving us as it did earlier. This does not mean it is wrong. It just is, how it is.
Our caveman instincts are at work
I always go by instinct and then wrestle with where my instinct brought me.
You drop your phone and then catch it before it hits the ground. You are surprised you can even move so fast and yet you still do when there is an underlying need.
We all have sure evolved to live in concrete jungles but our inner engineering is not updated. We still inherently work on caveman software. That’s our legacy system and it’s not going anywhere.
It might not serve us all the time, but it is there for a very strong reason. Our Survival. But do not hesitate to take calculated risks. Data Science is growing at an alarming rate now, it is only here to help.
So, Why Trust our Instincts anyway?
Honestly, that’s all you have
No, that’s not all we have!
Yes, you might argue. There’s intellect. There’s data. There’s crowdsourcing. True.
But at the cost of what? Distrust? If we can’t even begin to trust ourselves, how do we trust others?
Gaslighting
I’m sure most of you might have heard of this term, it’s right there, standing next to Ghosting. Smiling at you. It’s the lesser-known wrath of modern relationships.
Gaslighting is when someone leads you to question your own reality.
Now, it doesn’t really help if you don’t have a reality, does it? Instincts are what makes us, us. It might not be right all the time. But it’s always there to help us out. We just can not see the bigger picture. Not yet.
Gaslighting damages our intuition and rebuilding it will seem almost next to impossible. Distorting our sense of reality is where all the existential questions arise from. They are intriguing, believe me. Might even help us unravel the philosophical mysteries of the world. But staying disillusioned for a long time is equivalent to missing out on life itself.
“Trust instinct to the end, even though you can give no reason.”- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I think he’s right and if you observe for long enough, you’ll realise that too.
