The way I see it (and see myself thinking with it) is basically: Perspective.
once you adopt many and attack something from so many different angles you eventually whittle out the core; the best "true" way of looking at something. but of course it's an eternal work in progress and constantly being revised on the go, which is what makes it irrational.
the following is Ni/Fe biased I'm sure, since I'm basing it off of myself, but for example I'll try to put myself into the shoes of all types of people (not necessarily specific people, but a type of a person) and see it from their perspective and eventually you can see it in what you believe is the clearest way. (idk how an ILI experiences Ni) for clarification, it's not something i decide to do but i just do it (have been observing how i think for a while now)
so i think when i was a kid i had very strange&distorted ways of looking at things/life/situations/etc and sometimes i feel like my life is just the journey of gradually figuring out how i'm actually supposed to look at things more "normally" or properly.
when I give advice to friends it's essentially me giving a bunch of different ways of looking at things to help, because perspective really is everything. and i hope that it's not that they choose and adopt one of the new perspectives i give, but rather that they combine all of the ones into a unified perspective. (mental image of a bunch of arrows converging into a dot, and if you're able to reach/be the dot you see everything around you with as little holes as possible (depending on how many arrows you were able to assimilate))
So basically.. I really see Ni as "perspective" if you had to name it one thing.
However, Ni is named intuition of time and i'm confused as to where Time comes into play. I'm not sure if it's said if Ni ppl are often on time or have good sense of time, for example, but i think they say Ni PoLR have trouble gauging time?
Anyway, I'm almost always late to things because I lose track of time (and partially from having grown up with parents who didn't place any emphasis on being on time). I seem to believe I can pause time at will (my experience of it, that is) and create my own little bubble within it. For example, if my tutoring class is in 10 minutes and I'm not particularly looking forward to it, I decide to check out and lose myself outside of time and into whatever i'm doing (idk how to explain) and I forget about everything and suddenly I blink and there's -1 minutes left and so i frantically fumble to create the zoom call.
in this same way, no matter how hard i try i always lose track of time and end up being late to things (within my circles I'm known as the person who's always late and i even get jokingly congratulated if i'm only 5 minutes late T-T. but i wish i weren't, because it's disrespectful to always be late, and i personally HATE being on the receiving end of it because like Strat says I'm so so picky with my time..).
SEI and SLI grandparents were always on time to anything because they're more rooted to the actual minutes and hours, I feel. But Ni concept of time seems to be one that is detached from it?? idkk i also suck at estimating how much time it will take to do something (severely underestimate usually) but that's more bc of Te PoLR right?
but I am sorta good at fluidly arranging time to suit me, now that i think of it. i usually have this idea of how my day will look like with alternative lining-ups, and depending on whatever unforeseen things come up i rearrange around it (they are expected, anyway). i think i'm always aware of what i want to do next (again, it's not set into stone and is easily modified depending on external influences).
and i seem to calculate the most time/effort-efficient ways to do the things i want to do, so for example when i shower (hey there's lots of nuance) so i can shower the least but still.. so when i go out my hair will be clean (it needs to be washed often) and i just do it automatically without much effort.
on the smaller scale, say i'm in the kitchen and there's an island in the center with countertops around, so if I'm cooking, well you know, you leave ingredients and tools in different spots and there's always back and forth, but i try my best to minimize the amount of trips to go somewhere, thinking of all of my necessary actions of the future even if it's totally not part of what i'm focused on doing rn at all, and if i do miscalculate then it's rly annoying cuz now i gotta walk the extra back n forth (sigh)
and i always waste my own time but THAT'S MY CHOICE! (i tell myself) but if someone else causes for me to lose some time (a "time inefficiency") and it's nothing i can control that's so so annoying and it's like they created a pesky airbubble within my flow.
Small digression: I wonder if other IEIs are like this, but I have this little talent for, in a conversation, always finding the perfect word to express what someone is trying to say, and I really think that's rooted in Ni/Fe but I don't know how to justify using words for why.
so.. i feel like there's something i'm missing in my understanding about what Ni is (I think I wrote the all of my understanding/experience of it..) please illuminate me!
stuff i write is always so verbose and messythe underlined is the main question, if it was unclear what the point of this post is.