Individuality

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
                                                                                       -Oscar Wilde

Ah, Oscar Wilde. A master of the written word. Anywho, I feel like this is a quote that we have all thought about at one point or another. When you think about it, we are learning from the very second we are born (maybe even before we're out of the womb). How far fetched is it to say that we are the products of the opinions, ideals and attitudes of others all combined into a singularity? The entity as a whole. You.

I'm referring to the person in the direction of the above point.

If this is true, we could be comparable to a quilt. A patchwork of different ideas coming together as one to make up who we really are. This quote could have created complications as to whether there are truly any "new" ideas, however Oscar Wilde did not say all people are mimicries, just most. In The Merchants of Cool, advertisers strove to track down the estimated 20% of teenagers who are trend setters. They hoped to find the "next big thing" to market before it became "cool" (the second it becomes cool it's dead in society). In that light it becomes a cycle. We display to these merchants what is cool and they in turn sell that image right back to us. We adapt, move on to the next trend and the cycle continues.

From the sounds of it, the majority of the population is ultimately just copying one another. Are "You" and "Unique" the same thing? Perhaps the true secret to being original is like the following quote states:

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." (Albert Einstein)

Clearly he is a wise man.

Mitch and I discussed this and he believes there are original ideas we have. We can hear another opinion, ponder it ourselves and choose to add it to our cumulative knowledge or not. I argued however that the fundamental knowledge he is utilizing to judge the ideal may very well be the product of mimicking others in itself. Is that a bad thing though?

One of my favourite quotes from Paulo Coelho goes something along the lines of, "a fool is one who constantly quotes wise men" and to some extent I agree. It's one thing to ponder the musings of others, yet completely another to just quote them for the sake of quotation. You have to think for yourself. I remember reading a headline that smarter people are those who actually didn't go to school. Heck, a high percentage of millionaires are dropouts. Education can be seen as one of many mediums that mold us into puppets. We are told exactly how to do things, while also what is and isn't possible... definitely a fun little tidbit now that we're almost done high school.

I had a point to this. Got it. Copying, bad or good? I choose "or". Yes, a great deal of who we are is a collage of other's ideas, but we are in ourselves a unique collection of these different thoughts. I believe that our original, unmimickable experiences provide us with our own perspective, leading to new ideas. I may be shaped by one idea and another as well, but the two together can create something new and exciting that we couldn't have seen before. Like yellow and blue making green. A real life example is a university student went into engineering her first year and switched for biology. Though she continued through biology for her PhD, that mathematical influence she got from engineering gave her a unique perspective different than that of her peers.

At the same time we shouldn't act like herded sheep. Thinking for yourself is vitally important in life because it allows you to strive for what "you" want, not what society deems you should aspire for. Whether or not it's even possible is debatable, however I do think that on some level we are unique. We have different eyes in which we view the world and they're not something that we should allow to be closed without a fight.

Never stop questioning. (The next few entries will be much more concise)