Gut feelings
I’m really ambivalent about the concept of gut feelings. Personally, I hardly ever ‘just know’ anything, arriving instead at most of my conclusions after long periods of careful deliberation. I have never fallen in love at first sight – not with a piece of furniture, not with a painting, not with a person and not with a place. And even when I have drawn a conclusion, or decided on a course of action, or fallen in love, I’m rarely absolutely certain about any of it.
This leaves me in an odd position when it comes to hearing about other people’s gut feelings, as lots of people I know and feel close to really do seem to experience these immediate sorts of certainties. Does the fact that people say things like ’As soon as I stepped off the plane I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life in Greece’ mean a) that their lived experience is fundamentally different from mine, b) that the difference is merely in the interpretation of a feeling (after all I too quite like Greece and wouldn’t mind living there), or c) that this whole dicussion is pretty redundant, because to distinguish between feelings and interpretations of feelings is really just splitting hairs? Until I figure this out, I remain uncertain about whether to envy people with gut feelings or to make a concerted effort to ensure they’re never in a position to make decisions on my behalf.
I’ve read of an experiment in which a young woman with a clip board asked male passers-by to participate in a survey. Once the survey was complete she gave the men her phone number and invited them to call her if they had any questions later on. She interviewed some of the men on steady ground and some of them on a bridge that was swaying slightly, and apparently the men on the bridge were far more likely to phone her. The conclusion in the account I read was that these men had interpreted their physical feelings of anxiety, caused by the swaying bridge, as attraction for the woman.
It sounds to me like such a complicated experiment, involving such an unlikely scenario that I tend to doubt the validity of the study, but I can certainly engage with the spirit of the results and for me, they weight the argument against envying people who live by gut feelings. What if it’s just that the food on Greek airlines gives you indigestion?
