The myth of originality and how interesting thinking actually works
“There is nothing new under the sun.” — Ecclesiastes, roughly 3,000 years ago.
“There is nothing new under the sun.” — Ecclesiastes, roughly 3,000 years ago.
Even the anxiety about originality isn’t original. People have been wrestling with the what counts as a new idea, or whether genuine creative invention is even possible, or whether we’re all just recombining what came before us, for literally millennia. The fact that one of the oldest texts in existence already had a definitive take on it should tell you something about how long humans have been torturing themselves over this.
And yet here we are, still acting like originality is the highest creative virtue. Still performing novelty we don’t feel. Still quietly assuming we’re not the kind of people who have genuinely new ideas. It’s the wrong frame, and it’s always been the wrong frame, and once you drop it, something more interesting opens up.
We treat originality like it’s a thing you either have or you don’t. Like it’s some innate creative spark that certain people are born with and others aren’t. Which means most people spend their intellectual lives either performing originality they don’t feel, or quietly assuming they’re not built for it. Both are a waste of time, and both come from starting with the wrong question. “How do I think something nobody has thought before” has never been how interesting thinking actually works. Orienting yourself around it produces a particular kind of hollow, contrarian cleverness that gets mistaken for depth but isn’t.
The more useful question is what kind of mental architecture produces connections worth making, and that’s a question with a real answer.
Leonardo da Vinci is the obvious example, but he’s obvious for a reason. He wasn't operating from some mystical creative genius, he just refused to keep his domains separate. Art, anatomy, engineering, and physics weren’t different subjects to him, they were different angles on the same questions. So when he looked at a problem he had doorways where everyone else had walls. A biologist who’s also deeply versed in mechanical engineering sees solutions the pure engineer misses because his specific combination of influences generates collisions that wouldn’t otherwise happen. The insight was always there in theory, he’s just the one positioned to see it.
Mental scaffolding has been on my mind lately…
When you zoom out far enough, the whole thing becomes almost absurd to worry about. There are eight billion people alive right now, and no two of them are processing the world through the same lens. Same culture, same era, same Netflix algorithm, and still, no two people are having identical experiences of it, drawing identical conclusions from it, or making identical connections inside it. Of course there are going to be similarities between our ideas and our art and our work. That’s just what happens when you’re all living inside the same culture at the same time, swimming in the same references. But similarities aren’t sameness, and the fact that your conclusions rhyme with someone else’s doesn’t mean you arrived there the same way or that the view from where you’re standing is identical to theirs. Eight billion people, eight billion unrepeatable constellations. The overlap is inevitable, but the duplication is impossible.
This is what actually produces the thinking we retroactively call original. Not a spark, or a special kind of mind, but a specific and unrepeatable constellation of influences that nobody else has assembled in quite that configuration. Which means the whole originality conversation has been asking the wrong thing all along, because the constellation is already unique to you. The question is whether you’ve built it deliberately enough, and whether you’ve kept the pathways between the rooms alive.
That requires two things that pull against each other.