🤔 Do I have any original ideas?

One of the things I thought about a lot before we decided to start writing Tangential was whether I even have something new and worth saying. I mean, we live in an age of infinite content, surely anything worth saying has been said already? And if that is true, why write at all? Everything I will write about probably exists in some form and can be extracted out of some chatGPT summary. Even what I am about to say in the paragraphs that follow.

So how do I know if my ideas are original? And if they are not, are they even worth saying out loud?

Mimesis

We are far more influenced by people around us than any of us would care to admit. I mean, who in their right mind would say out loud that their ideas and desires are just a messy cocktail of what they hear and see. I want to believe that my desires are deep-rooted and intrinsic. I want to believe that my ideas are original and creative. Sadly that is very far from the truth.

Something that really opened my eyes about what we want and how we figure it out is the book “Wanting” by Luke Burgis. Wanting is a deep dive into why and how people come to desire things. Spoiler alert, it turns out that most of our desires stem from the people around us. If you feel like you are not influenced by the desires of the people around you, you might ironically be the most susceptible to it.

To give you a quick primer, desire is almost universally formed mimetically. There is a lot of evidence pointing towards that fact that we can skip for now, but most people broadly desire in one of these two ways — mimetic or anti-mimetic. Mimetic desire is simple, we aspire towards something we see and like. Anti-mimetic desire is slightly dangerous as it lulls us into believing that we are unaffected by what others want. The truth is that anti-mimetic desire is not being uninfluenced by what others want, but being staunchly against what the majority wants. This is why we see so many people who broadly believe whatever the majority believes, but also rigid contrarians who will always go against the grain to stand out.

Mimesis is simply a term used to describe mimicry, our natural tendency to copy what we see around us. Most people are mimetic in their desire which means that we slowly start building desire for something that is seen as valuable by those who influence us. Until recently that was limited to those in our immediate surroundings, but with the amount of time the average person spends online, our circle of getting influenced has expanded far beyond our neighbors and friends.

I don’t know if that is a good or a bad thing for the world, but it certainly changes the fabric of society. Desires have become more global and the world has become more flat culturally, as Sharon noted in one of our first pieces. What the young boy from Aurangabad wants is far closer to what the young boy from New York wants, rather than what the old boy from Aurangabad wants. What the young boy from Aurangabad thinks is far more similar too.

With desires and culture becoming more uniform across the world, I had a feeling that it has probably become harder to be original than it has ever been. The truth, as always, is a little more nuanced. Sure, it is difficult to be entirely original today. But it turns out that it’s not really a recent phenomenon. What’s equally interesting is that just like desires, opinions and ideas are also often formed collectively.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Metaverse

On October 28, 2021 Facebook rebranded itself as Meta. One of the world’s largest companies changed its name to reflect a refocused strategy in a new domain. Metaverse was going to be the next big thing very soon. This opinion was echoed by the words of the large consultants and the flow of money from the large venture funds. All the experts you could look to for guidance agreed — the Metaverse is here and it will change how we live.

Reality has a devious enthusiasm for subverting expectations though. The announcement from Mark Zuckerberg to shift focus from social media to the metaverse resulted in a stock selloff that lasted over a year, cutting the price of the newly re-baptized Meta stock by 71% at its lowest point. The price has since nearly recuperated all of the losses, but the path back was not an easy one. At one point the company was burning nearly $1 billion a month towards its metaverse dream. Zuckerberg announced recently that the company will be shifting strategic focus again, dumping its metaverse plans quietly and unceremoniously to focus on AI instead.

The point of this brief modern history lesson is not to discredit anyone who believes that the metaverse will be a central piece of the next big consumer technology revolution. I don’t know what the next big thing is going to be and I won’t pretend to. This story is just an illustration of how mania can blind everyone including the industry experts who, unlike me, have the track record to respectably comment on these things. And this effect is not limited to techno-optimism either.

In 2008, the financial world well apart. Bear Sterns, a respected US-based investment bank went nearly bankrupt in the space of days only to be saved by the Federal Reserve and JP Morgan. A few months later, another major US bank Lehman Brothers collapsed. The dominos began to fall and expose the underlying rot in the US financial system. The time between 2008-09 saw 35 of the 92 major bank collapses in US history. In inflation adjusted terms, these accounted for $700 billion out of the $2 trillion total losses from bank collapses in all of US history.

The funny thing is that all major credit rating agencies, the supposed neutral observers of the financial system, gave Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers an AA rating — the second highest rating a company can get — weeks or months before the collapse. In hindsight it seems insane that so many experts could have all been wrong about something so significant, but this is a pattern we see repeated across history. The truth is that even though we look to the experts to separate the milk from the froth, they are just as susceptible to “groupthink” as anyone. The only difference is they are influenced by other experts within their circle.

Note: If you want to learn more about the 2008 crisis, I highly recommend The Big Short, one of my favorite and most accessible finance movies of all time.

The Spirit of the Era

Artists are a rare breed relatively unabashed about paying homage to their influences rather than trying to hide them. As a result, art can teach us about the positives of building on top of someone else’s work. It is no coincidence that so many rap songs include “samples” from older music. It is no coincidence that when someone refers to a song as having “80’s vibes,” we understand what they mean. It is certainly no coincidence that art and architecture has traditionally evolved in “eras” where a large majority of the notable works to emerge from a specific time period follow a similar visual style.

It seems that artists have accepted a fundamental truth that the rest of us seem to be hiding from — nothing is truly original. So even though art is usually equated with creativity, by the strictest definitions of creativity we apply to other fields, most art would actually be… uncreative?

Surely that’s not true. But if most art is indeed creative, maybe we need to rethink how we define creativity and originality, not just in the context of art but in general. Creative people are often typecast as moody, mercurial individuals who have a eureka moment that unlocks their brain, allowing them to create something new and truly original out of nothing. The truth is a little bit different. Have a look at what Steve Jobs said about creativity:

So maybe creativity and originality is much more like solving puzzles than it is like magic. Magicians are also called illusionists after all. The definition of creativity we use is more than just semantics. Treating creativity like magic creates an aura around it which can discourage people and create artificial lines between people who feel original and those who don’t. It is only by normalizing how we view originality and acknowledging how interlinked it is to making new connections between existing things that more people will feel comfortable enough to enter the fold and share their work with the world.

What’s ironic is that some of the most revered creators are the first to acknowledge that their work would not have been possible without the countless influences they were able to draw from.

This does not minimize what creative people do, just provides a new angle of looking at it. Everything from modern art to games like Wordle are subject to the same line of derision — “Anyone could have made that.” But when you put something out in the world, its success is never a factor of the technical difficulty of creating it. Instead what makes anything — art, software, companies, games, music, candy or books — successful is how it makes people feel or the value it provides to the world.

Do I want to be original?

I started this article wondering if it was possible for me to be original in any significant way. I want to close it out by wondering whether I even want to.

The fact that we have access to millions of ideas and inventions from across the world and across the times is an unambiguous advantage for our creativity. If we accept that creativity and originality is usually about connecting dots in a way no one has done before, the access to all of these millions of dots means we have a remarkable number of potential connections we can make.

Trying to ignore the dots while being creative might be slightly valiant but entirely foolish. It would be the equivalent of starting by re-deriving basic arithmetic rules hoping to eventually build a rocket. As we discussed above, experts in every field from finance to music and from art to technology are looking at each other and learning from each other. So don’t create an unrealistic standard for yourself.

It is important to remember that no one begrudges Van Gogh for taking inspiration from fellow impressionist artists like Monet. The fact that touch screen, internet connected devices existed before the iPhone does not make it any less successful as a product. Albert Einstein’s work is not diminished by the fact that most of the foundational mathematics and physics he used to arrive at the theory of general relativity was done by past scientists. So maybe that idea you think is too heavily influenced by others could connect the dots in an truly unique way and entirely change the way someone thinks.