You've Probably Never Had an Original Idea

I’ve never liked the word “invention”; instead, I prefer the term discovery. Nobody has ever truly invented anything—rather, we come upon discoveries, and some people are fortunate enough to figure out how to monetize them.

Every time I think I’ve had a brilliant, original insight, a quick internet search reveals dozens of people who’ve already explored the same concept, often more thoroughly than I have. It’s a humbling experience that repeats itself with remarkable consistency.

Consider the history of major inventions—calculus was developed independently by Newton and Leibniz. Evolution was proposed by both Darwin and Wallace. The telephone patent was filed by both Bell and Gray on the same day. Stuff like this makes me think ideas show up when enough pieces are already lying around for multiple people to grab at once.

For any so-called “invention,” what makes it truly new? At some level, everything in our universe is just particles arranged a certain way: atoms, electrons, protons, and various subatomic particles. The telephone, the computer, the wheel—all just particular arrangements of these same building blocks that already existed.

Given enough time, couldn’t these arrangements be discovered by chance? The concept of “genius” might simply describe someone who’s particularly efficient at finding useful arrangements of matter—perhaps through skill, perhaps through luck, often through a combination of both.

That’s part of why “intellectual property” feels a little strange to me. We live in a society where people can claim ownership over specific arrangements of matter because they documented that arrangement before others. We’ve built entire systems to enforce these claims through legal frameworks.

Digital content makes this even more apparent. If I can copy a song or a piece of software perfectly and send it anywhere for basically nothing, copyright starts to look like a rule we’re straining to maintain, not something grounded in the thing itself. A digital song or software program is just an arrangement of bits that could theoretically be discovered by anyone.

Private property itself—the idea that certain people should have exclusive access to resources—isn’t found in nature. A wolf doesn’t check for property markers before hunting; rivers don’t verify ownership before flowing through land. These are human constructs that we’ve created to organize society.

Does this make private property inherently problematic? Not necessarily. These systems can reduce certain types of conflict by establishing clear rules. But they also create new conflicts—consider how nations wage war over resources like oil or land, essentially fighting over who gets to decide the rules of ownership in a given territory.

I don’t fundamentally object to private property or intellectual property protections. What gets me is how quickly people treat these systems like they were always there, instead of rules we made up and kept agreeing to follow.

So the next time you think you’ve had a truly original idea, do some research first. You’ll probably find you’re stepping into a conversation that’s already been going for a while. I don’t find that depressing. Mostly it’s clarifying.