Where did Common Sense Go?
How many times have you woken up and checked the app to see how you slept? It’s saying you slept well but can you be sure? You used to rely simply on how tired you felt. Now, that isn’t enough, you need a much more detailed analysis to give you the answer that simply listening to how you feel will concur.
Are you hungry? Should you eat breakfast yet? Or should you be fasting, eating a portion of protein, or doing a workout before you eat? Yesterday you didn’t quite close the red circle so surely today you should start exercising sooner so you can get in the required amount of steps to complete it. Somewhere along the line we stopped listening to our bodies and started asking our phones to tell us what to do, how to feel, how to sleep and quite frankly how to live.
I am not writing a piece on the detriment of technology, far from it. I’m simply suggesting that the habit of asking technology first before ourselves may have lead to the demise of intuition, the apparent loss of common sense in the modern day world. The problem isn’t the app or the tool. The problem is that the tool has overridden our instinct. It has become the only voice we consult.
Similar to a muscle, the less you use it, the more you lose the use of it.
Long before technology, the only option was intuition. The inner sense that something felt right or a bit off and your gut instinct telling you how to deal with it. We relied on our common sense to tell us that it probably wasn’t the greatest idea to eat that meal if we didn’t want a bout of food poisoning or the person talking to us didn’t have our best interests at heart and may not be as trustworthy as it first appeared. Gut instinct was our survival, a clever in built tool that equipped us to navigate our way safely through life.
Now it has become deeply embedded beneath the multitude of apps that we default to, to help us make a decision. Taking time to pause and really focus on our instinctive feel about how, when, why or if, seems more intuitive. Occasionally skipping our sixth sense has little effect, evading it continually may gradually diminish its power completely until we no longer have the ability to use it at all.
Outsourcing isn’t a new concept. In days of old we used to consult our elders, confer with tradition or experts in the field or consult the encyclopedia. Technology is the modern day and most convenient equivalent. So the question is, has technology desecrated our instinct? or has it just encouraged us to primarily look outwards instead of delving inwards for the answers?
Common sense is a phenomenal and much sought after skill that everyone, to some degree, is born with, though the levels do appear to differ from person to person! It’s important that we don’t lose the ability to tap into it as the risk of dilution and weakening in generations to come is tenfold. Common sense hasn’t lost its voice, it just gets drowned out by technology’s much bolder, dominant view.
The fix isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t require you to throw away your devices and disown technology. It is much simpler than that. Bring back the pause. Don’t reach for the app first, take a moment to consider what you would do, trust in your inner voice. Before you go with the algorithm, sit with your thoughts for a moment and listen to the answer your mind and body is offering.
Before you google it think about how you feel and what might be the cause. That 5 second pause is the difference between following instinct and following instruction. Maybe you have the answers all along you just need that time to figure it out by yourself.
Final thoughts
Common sense hasn’t vanished. It’s just become a bit neglected. Of course it will never replace the in depth information technology can give you, but it will restore your faith in your own opinion and feeling about life. It is an important skill that we need to tap into more often in order to survive. If we constantly look to technology to be told what to do, we will be lost when technology breaks down. Technology is not human, it doesn’t have body cues or intuition, it functions on facts and data. Listening to your own thoughts before taking on someone else’s is the most instinctive way to really feel what’s right for you.
PS “Common sense is genius dressed in it’s working clothes.” Ralph Waldo Emerson. Discover your inner voice contact Positive-Soultoday.