“You’re Unique, Just like Everybody Else”

I have sometimes wondered if making new music is possible anymore. Consider this- Spotify, according to recent data, maintains a database of 82 million songs. To put that into perspective, if I assume that every song is on average 2.5 mins long, I would need 390 years of non-stop listening to get through all the songs, once.

And if that is not enough, 60,000 new songs are added on Spotify every day. It is just mind numbing, especially when you look back at your playlist of the 50 songs that you listen to on repeat.

Surely, those millions of songs, and the manifolds more that don’t make it to Spotify, must have covered every possible melody, every possible rhythm, every possible idea, every possible message, right?

Every thought that comes to my mind- there’s 7 billion people currently alive on the planet- it’s crazy to think no one today or before me has never thought of the same thing. Every opinion I hold, must have been held by thousands before me.

And yet, there’s new songs that come out every day, and a lot of them make you feel ‘wow, this is brilliant’. Most songs are based on only 5 main notes (of the pentatonic scale), and yet, even after a million renditions of the same set of notes, there is still scope of creating something novel.

Inventions are occurring at unfathomable speed, so much so that it is hard for even tech people to keep up with the progress. New books are written every day, and impact millions of lives, even when it feels like everything that had to be written about should already have been written about by now, at least in some corner of the Earth.

It makes you question- will we ever reach that point of exhaustion, where every possible idea has been considered, every song written, every invention invented?

As someone who is constantly trying to wrap my head around the concept of infinity, I feel the answer to this question is a resounding no.

Our world operates in geometric progression, something our brains find extremely hard to comprehend for some reason. Littlest of things can compound on to become absolutely staggering, starting right from the trillions of cells that form one human body. Subtle differences can create entirely new species.

We might try to explain stuff with statistics, averages and distribution curves, but all of our definitions and measurements are based on one assumption- that the subject being studied is not going to change whatsoever. This cannot be farther from the truth.

And so, if you feel like taking a chance at something, take it!

Just because something has been tried once, does not mean it should never be tried again. Just because something has been done before, or even done ‘better’, does not mean there isn’t space for your version of it.

There’s 7 billion people on the planet, writing that song once, or publishing that book once would not reach every single person who needs to hear/read it. Sometimes, the job is to share the message again and again, perhaps in a different media, different language, different tone, different cultural context, different time; as long as there are people out there, ignorant to the existence of something, but likely to benefit from it, there is a need for someone to help them access the message.

Imagine a surgeon that creates a new, super successful technique to cure a disease. And now imagine if he were the only doctor in the world to be doing that procedure, because training any other doctor to perform the same surgery would lack originality/ creativity.

Sounds absurd right?

First off, what is the point of creating a revolutionary treatment that won’t even reach the needy, because only one doctor in the whole world is performing it in his short lifespan? It is as useless as a failed drug, because it failed to be accessible.

Secondly, learning that procedure is the first step towards future modifications and improvements to it. It is only when other doctors learn to perform the procedure that they can then begin to create on it.

After all, creativity isn’t about coming up with a brilliant idea in vacuum. Creativity is observing the world, learning from it and then, adding the unique element of ‘you’, to create something that has never been created before; to say something your way, to do it your way, to be your way.

We all marvel at the wonders of nature, right? But what is nature doing if not building on its already existing creations. The beauty of divergent and convergent evolution that creates this cobweb of diversity- a mammal with fins, a bird that cannot fly but can dive underwater or a plant that can eat insects.

Originality is an illusion, an idea resistant to change- the only truly 100% original thing to have ever existed, as per our current knowledge, was the big bang itself, and everything since then has been a constant learning and creating, repurposing, adaptation of the same stuff from the past.

The most beautiful thing about it, I feel, is that you toy around with these ingredients long enough (as did nature), and all of a sudden, you create -literal- life out of those seemingly inanimate things.

What I am trying to say at the end of the day is, just be you, and keep creating whatever it is that you wish to create.

You would never have existed if someone exactly like you had walked the Earth before. And no matter what you create, as long as it contains an element of you, you would have created something new, something that deserves to be out there, something that holds space in this world.

Yes, you are unique, and so is everybody else :’)