Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Um, every time. Everyone wants to live a life of agency, not operate at the whims of their subconscious.

"Whims" is misleadingly pejorative. All sophisticated knowledge has conscious and unconscious components. When they conflict there is no automatic rule for adjudicating. Creative resolution is needed and the condition for that to be possible is to do only what is fun—hard or not.

“Unconscious knowledge” is just a fancy way of describing our mostly stupid “lizard brains” that evolved for life as hunter gatherer not modern life. Yes sometimes we unconsciously understand something valuable but that’s the exception not the rule.

Can't really be true because the vast majority of subconscious ideas are culturally transmitted. For example the meanings of most words are understood subconsciously, reading works subconsciously etc.

Also many people speak of the importance of "intuition" in their endeavours. It is often deemed to be incredibly valuable and the main thing that makes people really good at things. What is intuition if not subconsciously held ideas?

Yes I agree *sometimes* they can be useful, even deeply. But in reality life our subconscious desires are far more likely to lead us astray than not.

Eg we know it’s a good idea to go to the gym but subconsciously want to watch another episode on Netflix. Or that we know sugar is poison but that dessert looks so tasty. Etc etc etc.

Actually I don't think most people "know" this in any meaningful way. They have received constant messages and pressure to that effect but not much in the way of explanation. This is also the reason they can't act on it.