People have the same ideas all the time. Ever looked at an invention on TV or in a store and said to yourself, “Man! I Thought of that years ago, they stole my idea!”

And now that they have the idea, it’s hard for you to use it. Because ideas can be protected by law—copyrights, trademarks, patents. And that’s a good thing on many levels, I mean, people who come up with great ideas that help improve people’s lives should be rewarded for their efforts and protected.

But rewind thousands of years ago, before “civilization as we know it.” People let ideas emerge out of themselves all the time, insulated from the rest of the world. Humans all over the globe arrived at the same basic ideas around the same times, without ever knowing the others existed.

Using rocks for tools, using spoken for language, using written language, hunting animals, foraging plants. These are all ideas.

Even story structures ended up very similar. With many themes matching spookily from culture to culture across the globe, with no way of communicating between cultures.

These ideas just emerged out of the human existence, all over, right around the same time. Who knows what causes this, and I’m not going to speculate right now. But what is important is that they were basically the same ideas, all coming out of human nature, emerging naturally.

But no one was trying to “own” these ideas. There was not the same level of “that’s my idea” as there is today.

Because of our sudden value on idea ownership, we have valued originality over almost everything else. And this can be good for innovation, but it can also really horrible for things like nutrition, and diet.

Why? Because in order to be acknowledged anymore, you need your own idea. Your own unique twist on something that exists. And that doesn’t necessarily mean better. It just means, different and unique enough to “own.” It’s MINE!

Sure, this could be good for the “evolution of ideas”, maybe. But it’s also just lots of people trying to lay a stake in the ground, to try and be seen, to try and be significant. It’s hard to do that with an existing idea, you just look like a copycat. And the fact that a “copycat” is a negative word in our society is a symptom of the idea that you must have original ideas or you are irrelevant.

Who cares if the idea is better or worse, as long as you can make the idea different, and market it as better, then you’ve won, regardless of whether it really is better.

This causes diet and nutrition gurus to invent strange, new, and extreme diets that are “different” from the rest, and look better as a result. Even if they are actually harmful to their “customers/believers.”

This attitude is so intertwined into our society now that I don’t even think people who create products realize they are doing this. They just know instinctively that if it’s not different enough, they can’t sell it. And we as consumers also feel this instinctive tug, if it’s not “new and improved” or a “guarded secret” then we don’t want it.

Ideas created in this way are likely not born out of our true nature as humans, they’re ideas made from the building blocks of idea competition. Ideas not born of ourselves, but bred from other ideas, which are not our own. Like petri dish idea science experiments living in our brains, instead of letting the idea flowers grow out of us naturally.

The problem is that what grows from us naturally has probably already been done before.