The Gut Instinct I Spent Years Overriding and What It Cost Me

I had cultivated, through an education in engineering and a career in data in Nagpur, a deep professional respect for evidence and a corresponding mild contempt for anything that could not be substantiated. This was appropriate in a technical context and had been productive in my career.

It had also become a habit that I applied to domains where it was less well-suited, including the decisions about people and situations that are less amenable to quantification and in which other kinds of knowing - intuitive, embodied, accumulated from pattern rather than analysis - are often more reliable than they appear.

I had a clear example at 24 when I took a role despite a persistent and specific unease I had felt during the interview process - an unease I could not locate in any specific red flag and therefore dismissed as irrational anxiety.

The role turned out to be exactly as wrong as the unease had been signalling, in ways that became clear only after I was inside it. I had a second example at 26 when I stayed in a relationship past the point where something in me had been clearly signalling that it was over, because I could not produce a specific and compelling argument for ending it and had come to treat the inability to produce such an argument as evidence that ending it was the wrong decision.

The relationship ended eight months later in a way that was harder for both of us than an earlier ending would have been. At 28, in therapy and in conversation with a friend whose judgment I trusted, I started examining the pattern of what my instincts had been telling me and what I had done with the information.

The pattern was consistent: the instinct had been early, specific, and usually right, and I had been suppressing it with a rationalist argument that was less reliable than the instinct it was overriding.

Learning to take instinctive responses seriously did not mean abandoning evidence - it meant understanding that not all relevant information arrives in an analysable form, and that the felt sense of a situation is itself a form of processed information that deserves to be in the decision.