THE SEARCH FOR THE GUT FEELING

**THE SEARCH FOR THE GUT FEELING**
By Alvin Chen

Introduction -
Let me take this short time to philosophize about life. Over the past couple years, I feel like I've grown a lot, experiencing lots of things. And now it's time to pull it all together. Every couple of months, maybe every couple of weeks, I want to take time and make sense of all of my experiences. Every day is different, and I'm always changing, so I want to develop a Grand Unified Theory of LIFE! (Not the GUT of physics, whose name I will deliberately steal for my own selfish purposes) This way I can trust my GUT when I come across challenges and decisions, without having to worry about consequences or risks. Of course, I'm still just started running around my track of life. Right now I see life from the College POV, as a guy who has done just a little bit of martial arts, engineering, and partying, but also as a guy who appreciates the little things.

What is the GUT feeling meant to be? In my opinion, the best philosophy is the one grounded in science. Science is the study of nature. Maybe philosophy is also the study of nature: human nature, ethics, culture, and a whole mess of other things. Even though I am exploring an abstract topic, I cannot ignore my scientific nature. Just maybe, if I can understand how morality, emotions, and ambitions affect the human experience, along with environmental factors, I can really begin to see why I'm here on this planet, and what I was meant to do.


So you're thinking, "What you were meant to do? Well that sounds crazy!" My life has been so ridiculously lucky that I can't ignore that there is some kind of overarching power in this universe. While I'm not acknowledging the existence of a god, I do believe that life has patterns and truths, which I will attempt to put down in this blog (continuously rehashed over time)

THE GRAND UNIFIED THEORY

1. Life is broken into periods and cycles
I give credit for this line of thinking to my dad. He told me this a couple of years ago, when I was just a freshman, still unknowing and reckless. His view is that in adult life, people work through stages. Education, career, family. The relationships with your wife, children, and friends all have a certain time period to grow, always happening around the same time for most people. I'm in my education phase, here at school, learning everything I can. But education cannot be limited to just school.

Postulate #1
Don't let school get in the way of your education -- Professor Gronsky

So this is why I begin my search for my GUT feeling now. Let's take a look at the periods and cycles I can make sense of by drawing together ideas from psychology and my experiences.

**The Environment**
Take today for example: Hot... Hot... Hot... but windy. That's very different than yesterday, which was just Hot Hot HOTT!! Before that? It was windy and cold, and before that it was just plain cold. Rainy too! These two periods of Cold and Hot separated only by the winds of change. It's true! The winds do mean change: Wind is generated when a high pressure system meets a low pressure system, and the systems have their own unique traits. Without going too much into how this happens (Because that would require me to read a couple pages of Wikipedia and explain them there), let's just draw that there are constantly periods of hot and cold on our planet, constantly cycling between the extremes! So, cycles in nature - plausible.

**The Mind**
--Something about how the mind reacts to the environment. To be written later--

2. Life and the theory (Conclusion)
Of course, Life is in the application, not the theory. I have come to realize that NOTHING is as good as it could be or as it should be. That is where engineers and civil servants find their places in life. Take theory and make it applicable, because if we don't dumb it down, nothing good will ever come of it. For example, I want to clean water for the rest of my life. Yes, everyone should have access to clean water. Water should be free of all pathogens, heavy metals, and other risks, but not yet. Crystal clear water, perfect, tasty, but not yet. Nothing happens in a day, nothing happens in a month. Nothing happens in a year or a decade.

Whole lifetimes can be spent on projects, and generations of great people must work in sequence to bring about significant change. Some of the great things to be accomplished on this planet will be above the individual, greater than the ambitions of one man. This is why it is so important to be organized in your work and work in stages. This way, when you pass on, you have left behind the groundwork for something much more important than yourself...

To be continued
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I enjoy philosophizing, so please let me know what you think. The extent of my theory might end up being only the experiences that I feel as an individual. But if you can explain your experiences to me, I might see life from your shoes, and it will definitely be different. Please share