Intuition and time to think

Or to follow your gut feeling, should I say? All the escapist services tech is giving us are really meant to occupy us, to steal our attention and they mask our gut feeling.

I have experienced it first hand. The camera I'm using recently to film my vlogs is a camera I already had six years ago. I had it and I sold it.

I sold it because the news, the reviews and a good part of YouTube was masking my gut feeling. I felt that this is the best camera for my needs for vlogging (because it has tremendous stabilization) and also for black and white photography (because I love black and white photography).

Why black and white photography?

This is the kind of photos I'm taking of my family, on our trips, of our day to day life.

There's a reason to the fact that it's black and white. We see the world in colour. Our memories are in colour. I want my photographs to be somehow different from what I see with my own eyes and how I recall my memories. That's why I want my photos to be in black and white.

Aesthetic

Besides that, of course, I like the aesthetic. I like the fact that when you make black and white photos, you don't really care about the colours. Obviously. You rather care about composition, about light and shadows — about such things. The things that normally, when we use our colourful vision, we don't pay so much attention to. Probably because our processing power is finite. If we process colours, shapes, shades — it leaves us less processing power for light, contrast, shadows and composition. But let's get back to our intuition.

Intuition needs time and space

It was difficult for me to listen to my gut feeling and to leave this camera as my main camera, at the time. So, I went on a years long research looking for the best vlogging and photo setup I could find. Actually, every so often my thoughts came back to this camera and I thought:

Yeah, but this camera was nice; this camera was really okay.

It's very difficult to listen to your gut feeling in today's world because of the amount of external information that is thrown at us every day, every hour, every minute.

I was sick and at home for the last 2 weeks. I'm very happy that during that sickness time I had lots of time to think or to do nothing — really, to be bored while staying in bed with a high fever. Such boredom-filled time helps take good decisions. It helps thinking about those past experiences. I have figured quite a lot during those two weeks — for example, that this camera ticks all the boxes for me. Too bad that the company that produced it will probably not continue making those cameras, but hey — we'll see!

I have figured a lot about my productivity stack, what I will be using in the future to be productive and to have enough mental bandwidth to listen to my gut feeling and to reflect on my past experience in order to push my life towards my goals.

Today's tech landscape is making it really, really difficult to reflect during our busy days and to arrange knowledge in our heads. Every time you have a fraction of time that you would normally spend on reflecting, on thinking, on watching the leaves on the trees move — you're looking at a smartphone.

And:

• if you're not looking at a smartphone, you're listening to music;

• if you are not listening to music, you're listening to podcast;

• if you're not listening to podcast, you're listening to audio books;

• if you're not listening to audio books, you are reading kindle books;

• if you're not doing...

You get the idea.

Before algorithms and the "like button"

Earlier on, before 2004, you had the opportunity to draw conclusions and to slowly build your life experience. Today, you have to actively struggle to be able to draw those conclusions and to actually build your life experience, which is crazy. If you're not doing that, if you're not ruthless, if you're not actively making time in order to have those reflection moments regularly to build your life experience, you are making the same mistakes again and again in your life. And if you don't believe me, look around you, amongst the people who are really very addicted to their smartphones — you can spot patterns in their lives, patterns that normally would never be patterns. Normally, you'd see growth and a slow increase in life experience. They would make better decisions with time. But those people who are really, really addicted to the electronic devices are following the same patterns again and again.

Humanity would not be so successful on Earth if it was not able to draw conclusions

To reflect is to be human. Building upon your own knowledge of life, and then the knowledge of past generations, of people who died a long time ago and preserved their life experience — is to be human.

So please, if you want to remain human, listen to your gut and make actively time in your days, in your weeks, in your months to build this personal experience and to actually get better at life choices.