“I don’t know if we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don’t have genuine souls.” Taken from Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, pg 98-99.

The first time I read this quote, it made me squirm in my chair. First with denial, then confusion, then denial again. Of course I have a genuine soul, I told myself while shrugging off my discomfort. I am an incredibly creative individual, and some of that creativity has to be original… Right? Of course. This is just a fiction book with weird, demented characters, and I am being bothered over nothing.

I shut the book, happy with my genuine soul, but then something happened. I started to pay attention to the words that I thought and the ideas that I came up with, and I realized how much of what I thought I got from songs I had heard, television shows I had watched, and books I had read. I realized that everything I thought did not actually come from my mind at all. For example, I talked to someone who had the brilliant idea of ending a sappy teenage love story with a nuclear bomb being dropped and killing everyone, and about a week later I was in the middle of telling that exact same premise when I realized that not only had I not thought up that idea myself, but the girl that had was sitting in the room listening to me blather on. Horrified, I began to reconsider the genuineness of my soul.

I came to the following conclusion: We are all simply reflections of our environment. Nothing that we do, think, or say is original; it has already been done, thought, and said before, and that is a guarantee. We take what we have heard and we twist it slightly before we repeat it, pretending like it is our own idea, and sometimes we truthfully do not realize we have stolen the idea. Everything great has already been written, and the only thing we can hope to do is to change it slightly and hope that it is good.

My friends, embrace the fact that we are not individuals, that the genuineness of our souls is questionable, and that we are nothing special, and then thrive in the mediocrity. Embrace that there are no more original thoughts to be had and watch the movies, listen to music, and read the books that depict our situations and be happy that other people are living through and have the same ideas and thought processes that we do. Take it a step further! Steal the ideas and character traits at will to develop the kind of reflection that you want to have for yourself, and take the ideas that you want to think up, because as much as we would like to think that we are creative, that we are our own selves, and that our thoughts are our own, the opposite is true, so we may as well use it to our benefit and stop this nonsense of “individuality.” Pfft, forget that! Be who makes you happy, and if that is copying someone, then do it. As Gillian Flynn said, we are all working from the same dog-eared script.

Side note: In the process of writing this highly original article, I took ideas from at least three other people, two of which I did not ask permission, in addition to the quote and whole premise, which I directly stole from Gillian Flynn.