Originality is a Scam

Stop Waiting for Lightning

I’ve started to wonder if the cult of originality is the biggest scam in creative life. People obsess over being “original” — as if originality is some sacred currency you either possess or you don’t. The startup founder desperate for a “never-before-seen” idea, the artist convinced their work only matters if it’s unprecedented, the writer paralyzed by the fear that someone, somewhere, has already said what they want to say.

But when I look at history, when I look at my own work, when I look at anything that’s ever caught on and caught fire, I see a different truth:

Nothing we celebrate as original ever truly was.

The so-called breakthroughs of our culture are recombinations. Shakespeare lifted plots wholesale. Picasso stole from African art and Iberian sculpture. Steve Jobs didn’t invent the personal computer; he took Xerox’s clunky prototype, married it with design, and called it Apple. TikTok trends are base iterations — remixes piled on remixes — until one expression hits the cultural nerve just right. The miracle isn’t creation out of nothing; it’s that we have an endless and inexhaustible capacity to re-imagine what already exists.

But our culture still worships “genius” as if it’s the touch of a deity. We elevate the myth of the lone inventor // the…