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We’ve talked about intuition — your brain whispering, “something’s off.”

Then imagination — your brain throwing spaghetti at the future to see what sticks.

Then emotion — your body yelling, “this one matters!”

And now, the one that ties it all together…

How to pick which imagined, heart-fueled, half-brilliant idea actually deserves to live.

A few nights ago, I was staring at my biggest idea yet. It felt electric. It also felt… slightly deranged.

Then this quiet voice chimed in, not fear, not logic, just a tiny, polite cough from somewhere near the back of my skull:

“Maybe test this before going full send mode.”

That’s commonsense — the fourth pillar of Angus Fletcher’s ‘Primal Intelligence.’

It’s the faculty that asks if your genius idea can survive contact with the actual world. The one full of bills, opinions, and gravity.

The word “commonsense” sounds like something your uncle says before explaining why he doesn’t believe in hybrid cars. But Fletcher's version is different.

He defines commonsense as the ability to match the newness of your actions to the newness of the situation (your built-in weirdness detector meets your reality thermometer).

It’s how you know which wild idea might actually work, and which will end with you Googling “can you return a llama?”

It’s contextual, narrative, and deeply human. It’s the ability to feel what fits.

It’s what lets you predict that, yes, moving your knight there might technically win the chess game but will emotionally ruin Thanksgiving.

And here’s the depressing part… we’re losing it.

Schools reward rule-following, algorithms reward conformity, and we’ve slowly outsourced our judgment to anything with a loading bar.

Meanwhile, commonsense, this subtle, story-shaped ability to sense what will actually work in the real world, is quietly atrophying.

The irony is it’s the one thing computers will never be able to replicate.

Because…

It doesn’t kill creativity. It protects it.

It’s the friend who doesn’t say, “That’s stupid.”

It says, “Okay, but maybe don’t announce it on LinkedIn yet.”

Here’s my best attempt at reverse-engineering how commonsense actually works:

Commonsense is editing. It’s imagination’s proofreader, red pen in hand, muttering, “Cute subplot. Cut it.”

“Commonsense” sounds dull next to the glam trio of intuition, imagination, and emotion.

Those three are the band. Commonsense is the tour manager making sure they don’t die in a Motel 6.

But here’s why Fletcher thinks it’s indispensable:

Without it, the first three pillars are a psychedelic screensaver.

With it, they’re a plan.

(PAIR-uh-coz-um) — a vivid imaginary world, the kind of detailed fantasy land you build in your head and visit regularly.

Your imagination builds paracosms. Elaborate ones. Paracosms where you're a bestselling novelist, or you've quit your job to run a pottery studio, or you've moved to Portugal and learned to surf at 42.

Commonsense is the friend who visits these paracosms, tosses rocks at the drawbridge, tests whether the plumbing works, and gently points out that you get motion-sick on boats, so maybe the houseboat idea needs a revision.

Let's use it in a sentence:

"I built an entire paracosm where I'd host elegant dinner parties with hand-lettered place cards and seven-course meals. Commonsense reminded me that last Tuesday I served nachos directly on my coffee table and called it 'rustic.'"

Take one of those imaginative futures you've been noodling on from earlier newsletters. (You know the one. It's probably been sitting in your Notes app for three weeks with a vague emoji next to it.)

Now do this:

Sketch it out. Bullet the key arcs, needs, and risks. What has to happen for this to work? What has to keep happening?

Imagine injecting it into real life. Not the sanitized version of your life, but the actual one. The one with the leaky faucet and the friend who always cancels plans and your tendency to order takeout when you're tired. What breaks first? What friction quietly murders your plan while you're not looking?

Ask which parts actually survive. Not which parts you wish would survive. Which parts hold up under contact with reality's general absurdity?

Design a minimal pilot. A micro-experiment that tests one core assumption. Not the whole grand vision, just the smallest hinge the whole thing swings on.

Don't wait for perfect conditions. Test what feels plausible. And let commonsense be your guide.