One night in early April, while lying in bed, I received an idea I had no business receiving.

I took a sip of water, set my cup on the nightstand, and turned the knob on the lamp. I closed my eyes and let my head sink into the pillow and into darkness. Like I do every night, I began to drift in thought, getting lost in a river of ideas and images, sometimes watching them go by as if on the bank, sometimes being carried by them as if in the current, always alternating between two states of mind, the one aware, the other blissfully ignorant. While oscillating between these two perspectives, a thought appeared, distinct from the others, that went like this: Buy Tesla stock.

What made this thought distinct wasn’t that it issued a command; I frequently experience thoughts that express some dictum or directive. Tell Mindy how grateful you are for her. Take the kids camping. Quit drinking alcohol. Pay the rent. Ride your bike across the United States. Every night there appears in mind a litany of to-dos, and every day a nightmare of daydreams. Do this, don’t do that. Go here, don’t go there. The river of thought runs on ceaselessly.

What made this thought distinct, in other words, was not its content, but its quality. It carried with it a magnetic property, one that I can only describe as intuitive, meaning that it interrupted the regular programming. It felt significant for reasons unknown to me and perhaps unknowable altogether, but it was because of this feeling that its arrival alerted me. And yet, like all thoughts, it arrived from nowhere.

I flipped on the lamp, grabbed my pocket journal and mechanical pencil—which I always keep within reach—and wrote “Buy Tesla stock.” Then I turned off the lamp again and went to sleep.

The next morning I followed my usual routine: groan of aching back, piss, brush teeth, dress, drink water, consume eggs, fruit, coffee, tobacco. As the chemicals of food and drug entered my bloodstream, I began to ponder the command I had received the night before, which puzzled me because it contradicted a personal tenet: don’t play with financial commodities.

The problem with personal tenets is that they inevitably come into conflict with other personal tenets. But if I could place my own into a hierarchy, “trust the gut” might rank near the top. Rejecting one’s intuitions without first assessing their veracity or value, especially when they contradict existing beliefs, is taboo in my world.

Seemingly every human beyond about age 12 has a certain appreciation for, even a respect for, gut feelings, hunches, premonitions, presentiments, intuitions, instincts, inklings, and impressions. Regardless of what you call it, we give weight to that experience of receiving an idea that is accompanied by a sense of urgency or truth. Yet despite this universal respect, we don’t always listen. Even when we’re listening, we don’t always hear. And even when we hear, we don’t always heed. Sometimes, however, we obey. Sometimes we are compelled.

I drove fifteen minutes to the office, got online, and began reading about Tesla and one of its cofounders and current CEO, Elon Musk.

Tesla is the preeminent manufacturer of electric vehicles. It’s the only EV company to date to have sold more than one million units and it leads the industry in battery and driverless technologies. It also has the greatest brand appeal of any EV manufacturer. At least one writer has referred to its customer base as the “Cult of Elon.” And though the phrase is expressed hyperbolically, perhaps pejoratively, it’s not unwarranted. Elon is responsible in part for founding and building Zip2, X.com, PayPal, SpaceX, SolarCity, Hyperloop, OpenAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and, of course, Tesla. Customers and investors have reason to believe.

In addition to reading, I did some thinking. I know from experience with radio-controlled cars in the early aughts that electric motor and battery technology is superior to that of combustion engines, both in terms of power and efficiency. I spent a few years buying and building toy cars with the most efficient made-in-the-USA brushless motors and high-powered long-lasting quick-charging made-in-China lithium-polymer batteries. At the time, interest in electric vehicles for human transportation was limited to enthusiasts who built them in their garages and raced them on drag strips to humiliate the owners of 800-horsepower muscle cars. When the first Tesla roadster came out, it seemed the product of rich guys wanting to have fun with a fancier toy. And while I had forgotten my playtime past, reading a few headlines brought those fond memories and former knowledge to light.

Right or not, I also determined that Elon possesses both competence and character, meaning he has the ability to accomplish what he would and the integrity to act justly and not take ethical shortcuts.

I then concluded that electric vehicles are an idea whose time has come, which the inimitable Victor Hugo said is unstoppable, and that Elon Musk stood at the fountainhead of this idea.

The next thing to do was obvious: buy Tesla stock.

Four days later, after retrieving lost passwords and transferring everything I could from my long-neglected 401k, which had recently plummeted 30%, I made my first active investment in more than a decade. I bought 25 shares of Tesla at a price of $549. It was April 9, 2020.

At the time of writing this, Tesla shares trade at around $1,900.*

But this isn’t a lesson in investing, nor is it an endorsement of Tesla. If it’s not already clear, I’m a complete noob. Prior to receiving this intuition in the middle of a random April night I didn’t follow financial news or news media in general. I didn’t take interest in my 401k. I didn’t pay attention to Tesla as a company or product, or to any energy or car company for that matter (I drive an ’89 Chevy van and smoke a pipe). I even mocked those preoccupied with trying to secure safety or power through the purchase of financial products. In fact, three weeks before buying Tesla shares, when the Dow dropped almost 13% in one day on the news of COVID-19, I chuckled at my coworkers as they scrambled to their laptops to move retirement funds into money market accounts. Human, all too human.

In hindsight, had I followed their lead I might have had twice the money to invest than I did. And yet in my ignorance I somehow had the prescience to “buy Tesla stock.”

Why? How did my brain know? Or did it know? Or what, in fact, does it know? This train ride isn’t over yet, after all. My decision may prove the be one of the best I’ve ever made; I may lose my shirt tomorrow.

Not only was I consciously oblivious to any relevant information, I also lacked any desire to invest in the stock market. It didn’t interest me at all, even seemed morally suspect. And yet a split-second intuition changed that. On a whim I threw half my measly 401k—all that I could get my hands on—into a single equity.

Psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman might say this was a poor decision. Author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman suggests that cognition has two modes of operation: one intuitive, the other rational. The intuitive is quick and handles decisions like when to broach a disagreement with your boss, whether to marry your girlfriend, and how to cross the street without getting run over. The rational is slow and answers questions like what is the product of 17 and 24, how long will it take to reach Rockport by bicycle on backroads averaging 60 miles per day, and is Tesla stock a good buy.

Kahneman’s scientific studies don’t interest me much, however. Because while my intuitions may be responsible for helping me cross the road and parent my children, they also seem to lead me into experiences that have little to do with survival. Why do we suffer intuitions that have no apparent connection to social cooperation, psychological development, or personal subsistence? These questions do interest me.

For example, that ’89 Chevy van I mentioned, I purchased it following an intuition at the close of 2015. Although #VanLife was a nascent cultural trend by then, I don’t recall being aware of it. I justified my intuitive purchase with two reasons: (1) I’ve wanted a Chevy van since I was seventeen, and (2) I needed a tool in which to hit the road and do journalism.

Or did I?

It wasn’t long before Van Life was a trend as well-known as the selfie. Today the Mercedes Sprinter is practically a cliché. If my interest in owning a van was originally innocent and independent, it sure doesn’t look that way now. It looks more like a product of groupthink. Perhaps this is what an idea whose time has come looks like culturally. From a distance, human activity resembles currents of water, waves on a sea.

I’ve witnessed the same phenomenon with my idea to buy Tesla stock. Millions of others had the same idea around the same time. According to Robinhood, the investment app that Millennials favor, Tesla was the tenth most traded stock on the app following the COVID market crash and is currently the most traded.* Did all those Millennials also have bursts of insight in the night? Or were they already active traders, privy to the opportunity inherent in market fluctuations, the potential of electric energy, and the fortitude of Musk?

Does intuition happen collectively?

If you watch ideas closely, intuitive or otherwise, you’ll notice they occur. We seem to be recipients of thought rather than originators of it. On this, both philosophers and scientists agree. But there is wide disagreement on whence thought comes. Some, of course, say the brain. Others suggest something much larger, much more mysterious. The writer Aldous Huxley, for example, coined the phrase Mind at Large, which refers to a kind of cosmic or collective consciousness. He wondered whether the experience of thinking is just the brain tuning to a cosmic frequency, like a radio tuning to an FM signal. If true, perhaps this is how it would be possible for an idea’s time to come on a collective scale. The idea is present in the cosmos already, waiting to be born; the human mind is the birth canal.

But what does this say for agency and volition? For that past few years I’ve studied mindfulness, Stoicism, and positive psychology, all of which are grounded on a central insight: there is space between the arrival of an idea and our rejection or endorsement of it. If I have an idea to eat a hamburger for lunch, for example, I can deliberate and either act on the idea and go get a hamburger, or I can reject the idea and choose to eat something else. At least, this is supposed; the philosophy of free will is deep and murky. But practically speaking, mindfulness, Stoicism, and positive psychology teach one to watch the arrival of ideas and assent only to those that are true or beneficial.

I guess you could say I assented to my intuition to buy Tesla stock: I received an idea, considered it, and then chose to act on it. At least, this is how it feels. I could, however, be a drop drifting in a cultural sea. Furthermore, this kind of fidelity to my intuition, this kind of integrity, a way of living I take pride in, has caused me to ignore other values I hold. Let me explain.

I don’t believe Tesla will somehow save the planet from global warming, which is an argument that adoring investors and customers like to make. Never mind Tesla, I don’t think the advent of EVs will in the long-term make a significant difference to our carbon footprint. Historically speaking, technological progress has tended to produce one thing: our proliferation. And that appears to be bad for the biosphere. In other words, I believe financial commodities are playthings of privilege that contribute as much to social disparity as they do to upward mobility, that electric vehicles will initially clear our skies but finally sicken our cities more than they already are, and that one should follow his intuition, even if it means purchasing stock in an EV company, apparently.

It would seem, then, that a person who reveres intuition cannot be principled in the popular sense. Either you go with the flow or you stand like a rock. Or maybe you try to do both in a kind of awkward dance.

So far, acting on the intuition to buy Tesla stock has proven beneficial. But at what cost? Should short-term benefit outweigh long-term consequences? Is making money a confirmation of truth? Is it prudent to profit from the folly of fools? Is it foolish not to? Maybe replacing our use of fossil fuels with other forms of energy really will save the planet.

And for whatever I’ve gained, my intuition has been impotent as to when to sell. To be clear, I did sell a few shares, and then bought a few, and then sold a few, and then bought a few again, and then sold a few—again. But that was because of greed and fear, not intuition. At what point could I say my intuition was “true”? When I retire? When I see a return of 700%? When I lose my investment and learn a lesson about the limits of intuition?

One thing is certain: we cannot cease thinking. There is no end to our ideas. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “Once and for all, there is a great deal I do not want to know. Wisdom sets limits even to knowledge.”

I wonder whether wisdom would also set limits to ideas. At what point should we leave them alone? And can we when their “time has come”?

Something to ponder while I lie in bed.

*I wrote this essay in late August. Since then, Tesla’s stock has split, it’s no longer the most traded on Robinhood, and I’ve sold my shares.