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Our obsession with new
Nothing is new. Everything is derivative. We’re all building on what has gone before.
Look at Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1726). Physicist, astronomer, philosopher and author. A key figure in the scientific revolution. A great mathematician and one of the most influential scientists in history. Yet despite this glowing CV (resumé), he humbly said this of his work: “if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
From cavemen learning to cook their food to experimental helicopters on Mars, we’re all just adding bricks onto the top of the wall. Yet, in our modern world, building on the past is no longer enough. Ideas have to be unique, clothing has to be unique, we have to be unique. In fact, unique isn’t sufficiently unique anymore. Nowadays we have to have a Unique Selling Point. Once the preserve of marketing functions and products, USPs now apply to you and me. We must be a brand of one. Brand Me.
The Old Testament tells us that this obsession with being unique is nonsense. Ecclesiastes was written five thousand years ago and yet it’s still relevant: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” Ecclesiastes 1:9.
I’m a definite cheerleader for being authentic. But where I diverge from this trend is the idea that we are nothing unless we have…
