Where Has The Art of Natural Intelligence Gone?

For people who’ve lived enough life to know, not all wisdom or experience can be Googled, taught by AI, or gained through social media. We come from a time before everything had a password, before our thoughts were curated by algorithms, before our conversations were replaced by texts, likes and comments.

I’m not trying to fall into the usual “those were the good old days” cliché, but there was a time when learning, living and even building a career happened by doing.

Remember the smell of books in a quiet library? The hours spent grappling with obscure university subjects that shaped the way we think? The carefully crafted plans, the long afternoons making photocopies and taking notes as interns—observing more than we spoke? Those were the moments that taught us more than any algorithm ever could.

We were the ones who used to listen, observe, remember or jot down a few lines in a notebook with a pen, trusting our gut, even when it went against the grain. But now, in a world run by Artificial Intelligence, chatbots, filters, trackers, and endless swipes, that quieter, deeper kind of intelligence seems to be getting pushed aside.

Call it NI –Natural Intelligence, lived experience o simply common sense, for many over 50, it’s still very much alive and it’s just waiting to be seen, valued, and honoured again.

Natural Intelligence? A different Kind of Knowing

It can be disheartening to see a world where people with no field experience, and no real expertise or understanding become thought leaders overnight. Yes, these days with a few clever edits and a well-timed post, anyone can pose as an expert or a trail-blazer.

Can’t you see how influence has replaced insight, how followers trump credentials? These days, it’s not about what you know, it’s about how loudly you say it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against new technologies or what the world calls progress (after all, I’m an experienced journalist running an online magazine!). But I truly believe that substance still matters or at least, it should and it’s up to us to protect it. After all, aren’t we the generation that knows something doesn’t have to go viral to be valuable? Our worth was never meant to be measured in likes, was it?

What We Know Can’t Be Bottled

NI-Natural Intelligence is a different kind of knowing: it isn’t available on-demand and it doesn’t refresh with every scroll. It asks you to stop, to listen, to notice. You can find it in the silence before the answer, in the patterns only life reveals over time and it can tell you the difference between noise and signal, between someone who knows and someone who’s just good at sounding like they do and it’s ours to protect.

Yes, Natural Intelligence is our inheritance, not the kind handed down through genetics or wills, but through experience, intuition, resilience and it needs to be preserved.

Real expertise isn’t built on likes or visibility, it’s earned in the quiet, often unnoticed moments where persistence meets curiosity, where knowledge becomes wisdom through lived experience, and that matters. We learned by showing up, by getting it wrong, by doing the unglamorous work that no one posts about.

We’ve spent decades building it: don’t let the modern noise convince you it’s obsolete.

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