This is Unoriginal

       What is being original? This concept that most people don’t think twice about is really a strange thing. If you go to the dictionary, and look up the word original, it will say “Not a copy or imitation”, but is this even possible? Students are told to “be original” in school everyday, and most of what they do can be passed as original. For anything to actually be original by the dictionary definition, then it must not have ever been thought of by anybody but the student at that point in time, which really is not possible. This illusion of originality can only come from the wealth of knowledge each individual has grown to have over the years, made up from others ideas, and they must in fact duplicate these experiences in a way in order to get their own personal ideas.

       For example, look at the famous band from the 70s Led Zeppelin. One little known fact about them is that music and lyrics from a lot of their songs is copied from other songs previously sang and created by others first. If you look at music as a whole, a lot of bands do this, in fact it has it’s own genre. It is called a remix. The difference between a “remix” and what Led Zeppelin did is that not only did he give no credit to the original creator, but when he was called out on it, he said that it was all original from him.

The act of copying someone else’s work is not necessarily a bad thing, though. Through history, many things have been created, and science has advanced almost solely on the spread and sharing of each others work. Looking back, things did not progress as fast as they did back when you could not just write it down in a science magazine, or on a website. Now, the sharing of the data in which people have been generous enough to give to the general population, has been making innovation an easier, more possible process. Two minds will overcome many more obstacles faster than one.

Expansion of our knowledge as a whole happens everyday, and we are all helping to do this. With websites like the Utmost Troubles website this is getting uploaded to, we are all helping fuel the inspiration needed for someone else to come and be creative, and write something else. People ask the question “whats the point?”, but maybe the point is to inspire the next big thing. Ideas come from weird places, and what any one of us does could be that weird place, whether we ever know it or not.