Gut is Great

Today, I'm indoors for a change, taking the opportunity to just relax with a pot of Earl Grey here in my apartment. I jokingly call this my 'safe house'--a place for me to hide and recuperate, to conduct secret rendezvous while plotting my next move, like one of those spies in a John Le Carre novel.

Of course, my life is not as exciting as those characters in the world of espionage. Nowadays I'm just another run-of-mill IT worker who works quietly from home, eager to have the weekend to write my weekly blog article, which no one reads. And I'm happy to keep it that way.

I guess I've poured so much of my thoughts into this blog that it serves as a useful tool, even for me, to understand myself better. I've had fun feeding the content here into an LLM and ask questions about myself. The more I write, the more of my personality and philosophy will be captured for interrogation using AI. 

When you make life decisions, sometimes you are not clearly aware of your own fundamental motives. Why did you choose to study what you did in college? Why did you choose your current job and career? And why this particular person as your life partner? Usually it's a mixture of reason and emotion. 

I've had to make difficult career choices before. You could list down all the pros and cons and weigh each choice carefully but ultimately everything reduces to a 'feeling'--something in the gut tells you this is what you want. So you go for it.

To me there's no such thing as a right or wrong decision, because you can never make an apple to apple comparison between them. When you reach a fork on the road, you'll have to pick one path to proceed. In life you cannot turn back and try out the other option. Even if you think you chose the wrong one, it doesn't mean the other one is always better. It could be worse. You don't get to have a control experiment to set the baseline.

Robert Frost would tell you to choose the one 'less travelled'. That would however depend on your personality. Some would prefer the tried and tested one. The well-travelled road could well be the safer choice for most. The brave souls who take the road less travelled sometimes have to pay with their lives, like those explorers of the Northwest Passage. 

For society to continue thriving, you'll need the outliers who take the road less travelled by. That leads to discoveries, innovations and in the startup world, unicorns. Societies that keep doing what they do will ultimately decline and die. Having too many risk takers who take the unconventional path will also be detrimental as there will be no stability. You need the majority of worker ants in a colony to continue exploiting existing food trails, while a number of foragers would randomly scout for new food sources. A colony continues to exist because they have this balance right.

We as individuals are enmeshed in a societal system, not unlike ants. We respond and react to signals in our environment. So all the decisions we make to a large extent is a result of many push and pull factors that influence us. Allow these forces to play themselves out. 

And you, having rationally considered all options using your reasoning faculty, and having thoroughly experienced the gamut of emotions in your entire body, would ultimately end up with a feeling in the 'gut'. That is the next 'token' which your inner LLM has generated. Follow it.