Nothing New

“If we are uneducated... we shall not know how very old are all new ideas.”
– G. K. Chesterton (by way of Brent Beshore)

I learned something important in grad school: none of my ideas are actually original.

This hit me hardest when I was trying to think of a unique and interesting topic for my thesis. After weeks of reflection and conversations with my peers, I came up with something brilliant: “Representations of the Arthurian legend, on film.” Amazing, right? I could dig into Monty Python, Camelot, Sword and the Stone, and pretend like that one from 2004 didn’t exist. So specific and niche and distinctive, right?

Wrooong.

Turns out, this is an entire subfield of academic study. It’s called Cinema Arthuriana. I came across this anthology that had collected the 20 best essays on the topic.

So, no, my “niche” idea was not new. A long, long way from it, actually.

After I graduated, I wandered my way into the startup trying to start a new social network and, ever since, I’ve been reflecting on what these two areas could teach other: Because the academic landscape is so dense and layered that I felt like I could barely make a stray comment without at least cross-referencing an extended bibliography. A bit of freshness and creativity would be welcome. But at the same time, every day, social network media feeds are straight-up bursting with people proudly declaring their “new” and “original” ideas.

Nothing new under the sun.

This is going to get pretty recursive here, but one of the truest things I’ve ever learned is that nothing is really, truly, entirely new.

I often experience this via what I call the Truth in Cliché. Essentially, it’s that after you’ve experienced something profound and transformative, it’s almost impossible to express. If you wrestle with it for a while, you’ll find that it’s something that people have said… a lot. It’s probably something that you’ve heard yourself a thousand times, but just never really understood it, until you’ve experienced it for yourself.

In fact, “there’s nothing new under the sun” is an example of this. It was written a few thousand years ago, but many of us don’t really get it, until we’ve experienced it ourselves.

New = Interesting

So, why pretend? Why act like everything—particularly our own ideas—are new?

Because new is interesting. Our brains light up when we encounter something novel. Paul Graham says “Interesting means surprise,” and this is what he’s talking about.

Why should anyone pay any attention to you, if you’re just repeating something that has already been said?

This seems malicious when we think about other people misleading us into thinking something is newly developed. What’s more surprising is… we trick ourselves this way, too.

“Nothing interesting is true.”

Unfortunately, if we didn’t already know this, social media has made it crystal clear: Just because something is engaging or appealing does not mean that’s true or valuable. In fact, it seems like there’s almost an inverse relationship.

I have a smart friend who’s a data scientist and he told me once that when it comes to analyzing trends, “Nothing interesting is true.” His point was that when people (especially in businesses) review some findings and claim to find something shocking… they’re usually wrong. Either their bias is incentivizing them to read the results a certain way, or they’re just missing some contributing factors.

It seems like this observation applies to a lot more than data science.

You already know what it is.

One of the reasons we obsess over novelty is because it allows us to believe that there’s some secret information that will solve everything for us. If I learn the new thing, everything will work!

But the hard reality is: that’s not true. I think, for most adults, we already know what we need to know. A lot of what we need to do is quite simple—it’s just that simple does not mean easy.

That’s why we’re addicted to novelty. We keep seeking new answers that will make things easy, instead of acknowledging that parts of life are just unavoidably hard.

What does this mean for creativity?

So, what’s the point of all of this? Cynicism? More reason to discredit and disbelieve anyone who proposes a better way of doing things? No.

In fact, that’s the exact issue that I saw on the reverse side of this, back in the academic ivory tower. It’s tough for scholars who have seen the same thing so many times to avoid reacting to everything just, “Yeah, I know.” If the Twitter Guy trends toward arrogant, naive optimism, the academics get stuck in arrogant, dismissive pessimism. That's not helpful, either.

Instead, I think we need more of two things:

Humility -> Learn from the past. The problem with a lot of the online declarations is the arrogance and ego blended in. People are proud of coming up with an idea, and defend it even more fiercely because they think it’s completely theirs. Bu one of the best parts of realizing that your ideas aren’t new is that you can skip ahead a few steps. If you think of an idea for a story or a business or a new economic model… go look it up! Figuring out who has already explored that idea and what happened to them and how other people reacted can save you so much time.

Creativity -> Enjoy remixing. So, if you can’t really be original… is creativity even a thing? Of course it is. It just doesn’t operate the way we often describe it. Babies are born, businesses are built, blog posts are blathered. But each one is a combination of existing elements.

Which brings me back to the original story: After giving up on the not-so-new idea of Cinema Arthuriana and a few even worse ideas, I eventually wrote 100 pages on what I call “collaborative genesis.” In other (less pretentious) words: All creativity is ultimately collaborative. That thesis specifically focused on comic books, since they inherently involve a mix of words and images, authors and artists. And the rise of the “graphic novel” in the late 1980s happened because of the blending of American and British culture… largely driven by a bunch of creative folks from the UK who moved to a new country together, lived together, worked together, were in each other’s weddings.

But beneath all that, there’s the fact that everything creative is a combination of your current observations and your past experiences. Your output starts with your input, both in what you notice in yourself and what you notice around you.

This is the way it’s always been. Always, always. If you’re looking for proof of collaborative genesis, consider the original Genesis—where God, creating humanity, says to His three-in-one Self: “Let us make mankind in our image…”

So, that’s where it leaves me: No, I'm not making things out of nothing. Like Carl Sagan said: “To make an apple pie truly from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” But that's actually super liberating. I don't have to make things out of thin air! Instead, I can collaborate with what's around me. I can remix and reuse and react and collaborate with what already exists. I can't make things new on my own—but I can help to renew the world around me.