Have you ever had your ideas stolen, or at least suspected that your ideas were stolen? I did. They were from my social media posts. They aren’t really original ideas, though. These ideas are from years of learning Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology and both from serious and petty discussions – online and from real life. I also got them from either some books or internet memes while others were from TV and music. When I put all these ideas together, I tend to form another one that I, at least, never heard of.
I’d consider these thoughts unique and my own. Sure I wouldn’t be able to know if these same ideas were formed by other humans from across the world. Either they tweeted, wrote a poem, music or book about it from their late-night rumination over a bottle of beer, after sex, or whatever – I wouldn’t know. Maybe all of our thoughts aren’t original after all. But what I can’t escape is that itch I have about how I could have written it first. This brought me back to one of those ideas I had when I was younger.
In my teens, my family and I went through a grueling financial situation. We were left with a choice to either maintain only the electricity or water supply. Of course, we chose the latter. It was also because of this hard time that I had my first rumination about life and the world. With no MTV and YA shows to entertain me (I loved watching Laguna Beach and That 70s Show), I spent my time reading books at home that I find interesting. My father was (and still is) a, what Japanese people call, Tsundoku. He buys a lot of books but reads only around some estimated 5% of them. This came to be an advantage on those torturous days.
I started reading some Readers Digest articles about the Big Bang Theory, something about a part of our brain that reacts when we are in deep meditation or when we think about God, and this early 80s American elementary school book about astronomy. Those things fucked up my mind – in a good way, of course. I spent my time in the balcony, with my co-teenage sister and pre-pubescent brothers. We would watch the stars at night while bantering and having conversations.
I’d also listen to Incubus’s Morning View album that I borrowed from a classmate, played in a 15v C-sized battery-operated radio. There is this one song from the album titled “Wish You Were Here” – it blended well into the current state of my mind that time. Later in life, I realized that it was actually about appreciating the beauty of nature and his feelings of connectedness to the universe. For some reason, despite reading all those books, I failed to realize this.
The song also made me remember about this film I watched starring Jodie Foster, titled “Contact”. If you haven’t watched the film yet and do not enjoy spoilers, stop reading here and jump to the next paragraph. The character Jodie Foster played, and her team, created a machine that transported her into an alien world. It was a radiant world that resembled the earth. She later found that it could be Paradise because her deceased loved ones were in it.
All of these things generated an idea about my connectedness to the universe. I forgot what that exact thought was but I revisited this same thought when I found my self in a university campus, a couple of years after, in a Philosophy class. I remember telling myself, “Hey, I thought of that, too.”
I realized that our thoughts are not original after all, that some person might have thought of the same ideas we have, but just like me and the others, the ideas were never given monetary or attentional credits. I can’t help but seethe in annoyance about Greek philosophers getting recognized while the less fortunate ones weren’t given the chance to publish their work and be known to the world.
It also made me remember about the unfairness of the world through Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison – the latter stole the former’s idea. Funny how life works because only in the 21st century – a century after these two people’s existence ended- did Tesla received recognition from the world.
Someone stealing, or at least I suspect, stealing my idea, gave me a nudge to go back to writing. Social media targeting is real that I’ve become so engrossed about posting my rebuttals on social media about our country’s political status quo, that I forgot about a part of my self that yearns to be one with her thoughts, then writing them and showing them off to the world through my blog. I might not earn a Nobel Peace Prize, but hey, articulating my thoughts makes me feel good. At least I get to share my ideas with some audiences.
So… hold your horses, bitches – I am back! I will fire up this blog with all of my ideas. If I won’t get a monetary credit, at least my ideas will be recognized, sealed with a time-stamped proof that I thought of it first.
Panic Realizations 