Room for Thought

I had been having my quarter-life crisis some time ago. I was feeling stuck. So, I called my friend. And the one statement from our conversation that stuck was that my 1 year now is worth much more than what my 1 year of my life 20 years down the line would be. Some gears unjammed in my brain and I took a look at my life. I had a job that paid okay, and that was it. My dreams were much bigger, but my actions weren’t aligned. Everybody around me was doing the same thing - working in an office, getting paid more or less in the same range, spending their time almost the same way. Everybody was an individual, but from a bird’s eye view, all of the characters seemed to be controlled by the same controller. It felt like the same program was burnt into everybody’s system, just with a bit of randomness. The stream of ideas that we think is uniquely ours may not actually be ours.

Memes are a big part of internet culture, and I found myself using memetic language in everyday conversation. But over time, I noticed that all of us were using the same phrases, references, and jokes. The comebacks felt clever until I realized everybody had the same thing in their heads. Even comments on r/memes became predictable. And originality was so rare that it stood out.

You don’t have to go far to see unoriginality. Open a popular YT music video, and you’ll find a top comment that says “Who’s listening to this masterpiece in 2026?”. Go to a meme post on Instagram, and you’ll find “normal-stuff (cross), funny-variation (tick)” comments. And if you could talk to some school kids in 2026, you’d be lucky to not see them flapping their arms and saying six-seven.

I bear no ill will towards people who talk in hackneyed phrases. But it bothered me to think that I was losing my originality. While I started out with a lack of originality in memes, the bigger question is the originality of thoughts. For example, whenever I ask people how they like to spend their weekend, the answer is some combination of cafe, travel, movies, and doomscrolling. I’m not saying that going to a cafe or watching a movie is inherently unoriginal. But when the same few answers appear so frequently to a question with limitless possibilities, it makes me wonder how independently we are making those choices.

Some of you may ask what's the problem with unoriginality. To this I shall quote a famous phrase that I have forgotten the origins of - ‘Variety is the spice of life.’ Here, variety isn't merely about how many things you're exposed to. It's also about encountering things you couldn't have predicted.

One weekend, while switching TV channels, an astrology show was airing. I’m not gullible enough to fall for it, but that day I watched that show for 10 minutes straight. The astrologer’s schemes and methods were original to me despite being laughably unintelligent. If somebody asked me how to get a job, I could never imagine asking them to take a few neem leaves, spin them round a special tree and donate a homemade deep fried food item to a specific group of people; but the pundit on the screen said it without the slightest smirk. Those 10 minutes were just pure unpredictability, filled with bizarre problem solving techniques. The ideas were ridiculous, but the experience reminded me how predictable my usual information diet had become.

To claim my originality back, I left Instagram. It seemed like the biggest contributor to the problem. It filled my brain and everybody else’s with the same ideas. It gave us some common ground but took away the originality which makes people interesting. It’s almost a year since I’ve left Instagram as a regular user. I do visit Instagram, and I do watch memes on it. But now I do it as a tourist. I log in once every couple of months, respond to the messages I’ve got, see the posts that people have put, and log out within a day or two. And if there’s something big happening on Instagram, I hear it from the people I interact with in real life. I’ve stopped all the recommendations on YouTube and now rely only on the subscriptions feed.¹

I don’t know if leaving Instagram made me more original. Perhaps originality isn’t something we can possess. Maybe it’s something we have to leave room for.

Footnotes

1. I had forgotten that YouTube had a subscriptions-only feed until a Technology Connections’ video reminded me. ↩