intuition can be intelligent

Hey all, my book is a 2025 pick for the Holstee Book Club! Their manifesto was on my wall over a decade ago, so I’m enjoying another full circle moment. I’ll be doing a free event and interview with the lovely Amy Giddon tomorrow at 10am PT / 1pm ET - more info at holstee.com/jay.

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When I was a kid, I followed my intuition. This is typical. Kids, babies especially, live in an almost-pure present moment awareness. They follow their emotions and feelings in a way that’s as beautiful as it is challenging. As we get older, we build more and more layers of concept and reason. We transition from pure instinct to some kind of ‘self’.

In my case, as the conceptual layer grew more and more powerful, it began to override my intuition. As a young adult, I rationalized everything, including emotions, discomforts, and relationships. My conceptual mind helped me find safe harbour from the inevitable pains and discomforts of life. It was a decent short-term strategy.

It certainly helped that I was constantly being rewarded for my intellect. From my teachers to my parents, from strangers to other kids in my class, I got the most praise and attention when I was being clever. As I became a teenager, there was a general sense that book smarts were going to lead me to college, and therefore a happy, wealthy, and healthy life. So naive!

My developing abstract intelligence helped me succeed in so many ways, but happiness wasn’t one of them. In my 20s, I found myself fairly numb and aimless as a budding young rationalist looking down on anyone who believed in anything.

There’s so much our collective intelligence has made possible in this wondrous, advanced society we’ve built, but isn’t it interesting that it also teaches us to disregard our intuition completely? Our instincts have been honed for millennia. Just because they can be wrong sometimes, doesn’t mean they’re useless. Our gut feel, driven by instinct, can often be the compass we need to face uncertainty.

Of course, there remain areas of life where trusting our instincts would be a mistake, especially since they can be so easily manipulated by disinformation. Science and the pursuit of ‘good explanations’—as David Deutsch puts it in The Beginning of Infinity—is the greatest tool we’ve ever created to see clearly without bias. Yet Deutsch also points out that all good explanations start with an intuition.

Here lies the anatomy of our challenge. When do we trust intuition? When do we ignore it in favour of cold, logical calculation? How do we integrate the best of both? As I've become more focused on being a happy, integrated person, I’m learning how to balance thinking and feeling in daily life.

Two weeks ago I cancelled a trip from Canada to the US. It was a decent opportunity and I really wanted to go, but I kept procrastinating on booking flights. I wasn’t sure why. Somehow, I found it easy to tell my colleagues that I was excited to come visit, but in private, I couldn’t seem to push through booking the ticket.

After a few days of this, I noticed a lot of tension welling up about the trip in the pit of my stomach. I spoke to my wife about it, and as I shared out loud, we both realized that I was really nervous about crossing the border at a time when that border was the subject of intense political debate and media scrutiny.

Logically, I knew that the media was sensationalist and that the odds of anything happening were pretty low (though, not zero). My instincts were telling me I shouldn’t go in a way that I couldn’t ignore. I cancelled the trip. It felt like the right thing to do, even though I still think I was overreacting.

Ultimately, the trip would have probably been fine, but I felt such a burden release after I cancelled. The reality is, even if things did go smoothly, I clearly would have been very uncomfortable the whole time. My instinct may not have been accurate to the nuts and bolts of the situation, but it was highly accurate with respect to the toll this trip was going to have on my nervous system in a phase of life where I have very little energy to spare.

So in a way, this was an intelligent decision. It was logical. I simply included my intuition and felt sense as a meaningful sources of data, along with statistics, anecdotes, and analysis. It wasn’t a purely rational thing to do, but it wasn’t purely intuitive either. It was an integration of my rational and intuitive mind, based skillfully on the limited, ambiguous data coming from both the world and my inner experience.

This duality is not unlike the border itself, actually. Borders aren’t physical realities, they are conceptual realities. Yet they very much govern our lives. We can talk about the border in terms of a line on a map, yet it also is a very real place with terrain, constructions, and human beings who are also subject to political and media conversations. Both frames are relevant.

It’s wild to think that there once was a little baby monkey with not much other than pure intuition who grew up to demonize anything that wasn’t rational. A few decades later, there was even a period when he antagonized his conceptual mind in pursuit of more distance from it in meditation.

Now I find myself integrating both lenses, using the organized discernment of my conceptual mind in conjunction with the felt sense of my intuition to navigate the uncertain terrain of life. There’s another big opportunity arising in the Bay Area this summer; I think it should be fine, but let’s see how my gut reacts.