The Other Guy

It must have sucked not to be Newton.

I can’t imagine the frustration of discovering literal calculus on your own, only to have people tell you that you just copied it from someone else. I can’t even recall his name. Maybe in certain parts of the world, they remember the other guy instead of Newton, but where I come from, Newton gets the credit. When you are the father of modern physics, you get calculus thrown in as a bonus.

Perks of reputation, I guess.

This raises an inherent and interesting flaw in our modern giving of credit, and not just because modern physics is quickly being upstaged by postmodern physics (thank you, quarks, for being quirky). Originality is prized more than excellence. Even this essay is not an original idea—it was inspired by a character in a book (thank you, Brandon Sanderson, for Wit). Copyright laws are meant to protect people from having their ideas stolen, but they also prevent people from having their ideas recognized when they aren’t stolen. Tying capitalism to creativity is a trying endeavor, and though all creatives prize recognition and crave the connection that comes from sharing their work, the endless competing for prizes robs us of this delight (thank you, industrial revolution, for nothing).

We are all factory workers, in our own ways.

Work rushed to press, like grapes, can subtract from the necessary time an idea needs to age, like wine. The fear of being upstaged uncages a restless, relentless pursuit of being first, without first asking the question, “Is this ____ even ready?” Progress can cause a regression of humanity and rejection of perspective as we rush to our postmodern press. The rise of social media has given rise to voices that were previously muted, but it has also caused a general rushing of thought, like wind, that pushes heads down, like trees, compelling eager fingers and darting eyes to get the joke off before anyone else, to get the word out before everyone else, to be like no one else. There is a beauty in this, and a tragedy, as an accelerated aging process forces people and ideas to grow up faster than is healthy, sent out like clone troopers to fight a war that they never signed up for. The pressure to produce is toxic and insidious, keeping us in a constant race toward an undetermined goal, until Sidious himself brings us all to a screeching halt with Order 66.

Or in this case, Covid-19.

Since everything started shutting down, I’ve noticed something unsettling within myself—an alarming inability to settle myself. I have become more productive, not less. Instead of slowing, I’ve sped, afraid that this too shall pass, and my life shall be the same. When no one can work, I don’t feel the pressure to find a new job, but what about when life returns to normal? This restlessness keeps me moving when I probably should be resting. Even as I write this essay, my fingers are twitching, searching for the next sentence, the next thought, lost in the hallucinatory frenzy of creativity. I need to finish it before I have to leave, leaving the moment behind, to be completed by and credited to another.

If I stop, I’ll starve from lack of stimulation.

We are all biologically hardwired for action. Humans like to do things. I don’t think this is a bad thing—life would boring and borderline depressing if we never, like, moved. But I can feel within myself when my rest reserve has been depleted, when I’ve stepped back onto the hamster wheel, when I’ve lost myself in my self-imposed deadlines and self-inflicted projects. Selfishly, I wish that I had more time to myself—an extra four hours when nothing else moved and my brain could catch up with my neurons and my progress with my projections and my movement with my motion.

It must have sucked not to be Edison.

Before he came along, people slept eleven hours a night, I’ve been told. Thanks to him, I am able to watch Avatar: The Last Airbender when I should be sleeping, unable to shut off my overworked and underrested brain without mind-bending first. Because of his antecessors, who connected the world with more than light, I lie awake at night, wondering if someone else cattyglobal to me is in the process of publishing or copyrighting the same idea as I, but better, or worse, worse. If someone upstages me, it is one kind of pain, but if someone beats me to press with an inferior product, it is a deeper and more penetrating pain. The knowledge that they didn’t even do our shared idea justice is incredibly unjust. I feel bad for the other guy, who also invented lightbulbs, orbs of incandescence far better than the competition’s, but who didn’t adhere to the Fordian factory line, whose superior product was upstaged while his patent was still pending.

What am I to do with this reality?

A more selfless individual than I, like Elizabeth Gilbert, would argue that ideas like to jump around from person to person—that we don’t own them, but we get to participate in bringing them to life. We shouldn’t be mad when someone else brings our idea to life, because it wasn’t our idea to begin with, but a thought seeking a host. Good for her. I’m glad she can think that. To me, it sounds like a terribly one-sided relationship, one where we must give our idea constant attention, lest it leave us for someone with more time.

Apparently, ideas are not monogamous.

Unlike Elizabeth, I am not a selfless individual. I like recognition. I like seeing my name on things. I do care what people think about me, particularly my close friends—but close friends don’t buy books in bulk, and for better or worse, money is still the currency of society. I do want to be successful, even recognizing the inherently self-defeating nature of our modern and postmodern definitions of said success. We all want to be championed and celebrated and cherished for our contributions to creativity. I think we deserve to be.

So what are we to do?

What are we to do when we recognize that our prize has already been won? What are we to do when we discover that our song has already been sung? What are we to do with our unfinished passion projects, our unborn, incubating ideas, or our unwritten, stalling stories, which every day become less relevant, like a radioactive element rapidly descending in half-lives toward the barest of existences, never really dead, but never fully alive? Which idea should we pursue? Which story should we write? Which project should we take on? Which will be most readable or watchable or relatable or marketable—and in our heart of hearts, which of those parameters actually matter to us?

The most elusive of all emotions is certainty.

Because we aren’t in control. As this global pandemic has made abundantly clear to us, our postmodern life is unpredictable and unsustainable and unresolvable. This can be frightening or freeing, a paradigm-shattering realization of fragility, or a paradigm-shifting invitation to fertility. We are being invited to co-create our lives, with other people and with higher realities. Our ideas are our own—and they are not. Recognition matters, and it does not. A paradox, once accepted, is more reliable than certainty, because it offers more than one answer to the question at-hand.

Maybe we need to start asking different questions.

Maybe, instead of asking which project to pursue, which belief to adhere to, which job to apply for, which worldview to adopt, or which action to take, we should be asking ourselves something else. Something more real. Something like, “Who am I becoming in this? What is this action forming within me?” Maybe the choice in the moment, though important, is secondary to the internal relationship with the journey itself. Maybe our rushing has robbed us of the joy of running. Maybe there is no right answer.

Maybe each moment is both more and less crucial than we have been led to believe.

Whether I end up like Newton and Edison or Leibniz and Tesla, I suppose that Elizabeth is probably right. Perhaps I could spend less time scurrying and worrying about whether I’ll make it, and more time wandering and wondering about where I will take it. I would still prefer to be recognized. I would still prefer to succeed. I would still prefer to share what I have to share in the form I preferred to share it. But even if someone cattyglobal to me writes an essay on this very topic and publishes it first, it was still worth the writing of it, because of who I have become and what it has formed within me. I do not have to seek the prize. I can delight in the moment. I can give myself a break. I can allow myself to rest. If Newton’s spot is already taken, that’s ok.

I can be the other guy.