So… here’s me reaching out to the community to explain How The World Works… this time, thankfully, not written by Noam Chomsky.
I’m obviously kidding. I’m in no position to lecture anyone on basically anything, but I want to share a much more personal piece than what we typically cover here.
This one is all about processing signals from your body. What people commonly refer to as instinct, intuition, or gut feeling.
Part 1
We all have it. I’m confident you’ve listened to at least one song in your life that gave you goosebumps, just as I’m sure you’ve looked down a dark hallway and felt an immediate chill. There are chemical processes behind pain and pleasure that are tough to explain rationally.
Take falling in love: you don’t make an executive decision to do it, yet when it hits, you can’t stop it. The reverse happens when you instantly dislike a stranger. It isn’t blind prejudice; it’s subtle pattern recognition. Your brain registers cues that make you suspicious—often because someone with those exact traits burned you in the past. You might not pin down why in the moment, but your guard is up.
All of these reactions (and many more), are what I’d describe as gut feeling. They are fundamentally a collection of chemical reactions and biological rules of thumb acting as navigation tools through life.
Part 2
For better or worse (and at the expense of another self-deprecating joke), I usually describe myself as a Labrador. In most settings, I’m just a guy with an easy smile and a non-threatening, non-competitive demeanor that makes it easy for people to open up.
Yet, I’ve also been called intimidating or arrogant, especially by people who have just met me. I express opinions with conviction; I’m quick to spot and discard nonsense, and, most importantly, I listen very closely.
Those traits are an immediate red flag for anyone operating with an ocean of knowledge that’s only one foot deep. They can’t casually talk in circles around a subject with half-baked takes, nor can they dynamically adjust their thinking as the conversation evolves. If I say “I like black”, they’ll cling to that for the rest of the chat, assuming it means I somehow hate white and have ignored every shade of grey in between.
When I mention my political perspectives, which I rarely bother doing these days, the takes are usually met with head-on resistance from both sides of the aisle. Yet as I lay out the underlying logic, the people I actually want as friends update their views in real time and find common ground, while the rest stay fixated on the fact that I said I like white.
I imagine a lot of you run into the exact same thing.
Part 3
What might not happen as often, though, is the intersection of these two things: raw instinct and deep analytical processing.
For me, when they collide, it sucks. Let me pause and deliver that with full emphasis in a greatly improvable British accent:
It bloody sucks.
The reason is simple: when the two combine, it surfaces as depression.
It’s an overwhelming state I can’t simply switch off. It goes on for about a full week and colors (more like removes the light of) everything I do.
The only real cure is time.
You might ask: gut feeling and low moods? Sure, they rhyme. But what do personality, logic, and knowledge have to do with it?
Somewhere in the back of my mind, my brain has been running scenarios on a complex problem, and my nervous system delivers the final output as quiet sadness. The sadness is the answer to an unconscious mathematical equation. It’s preemptive grief for something that I do not know or understand (at least yet). The variables have already aligned in my head, even if the events haven’t played out in real life.
Something bad is approaching, and I can feel it in my bones.
Part 4
Beyond any melodramatic framing, I have a personal track record with this sensation that I genuinely despise… mostly because it has a 100% hit rate.
I’ve felt this specific weight three times in my life:
The first was around 2008. It hit me roughly three months before one of my major reference figures, my grandfather, passed away.
The second was in July 2019. I vividly remember aggressively pacing a dark corner of Keio University in Tokyo, calling my girlfriend, and bawling my eyes out over an impending sense of collapse in the markets and the world.
The third time started a few weeks ago.
I can’t pinpoint the source yet, but it genuinely gives me the creeps. This may all very well be some type of main character delusion.
Yet… I’m confident a shift is coming; I just don’t know what it is. But I do know that the impact (in my life) will be substantial.
And because all of this feels a bit gloomy, I’ll finish with a very short, personal video from a training session with a dog that should still be in my life.
Miss you, buddy.
If you found value in this analysis, please hit the ❤️ button and share your thoughts in the comments. It helps us bring institutional-grade research to a wider audience.
And if you liked this post, we’re confident you’ll love this:
