NdukuOutLoud

On striving, remixing, and the myth of originality.

It’s Tangent Tuesday , so here’s the spiral my brain decided to take me down this week:

We talk a lot about “striving to become the best version of of who we are” , of “killing our old selves”, of “becoming the new you.” That language assumes something big- that we’re not already living to our true potential, that there’s always something more waiting for us. I’ve long believed that ( still do, I think).

But then I started wondering : who decides that I am capable of more? And who decides that I am not?

Strangely enough, I think, that the answer is the same for both. Our environment, our upbringing, the media we consume- these don’t just shape who we are now. They also shape who we think we could become.

That’s all fine, until we stop becoming what we are meant to become and start borrowing what we feel like we should become.

And here’s the dilemma: how do we even know which one is truly us and which one isn’t? I wish I had come with a manual, neat guidelines and “do not machine-wash instructions. But I didn’t. None of us did.

Philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre argued that there is no fixed essence. We aren’t born with a pre-written script. Instead, we are condemned to freedom- forced to choose, again and again, who we want to be. That means that even the “original self” isn’t something we discover; it’s something we create.

So maybe none of it is original. Maybe all of it is borrowed. But originality doesn’t mean untouched. It means remixing what exists into something uniquely ours.

Much of what we strive for-success, happiness, recognition- is borrowed from culture, family, or history. But there’s a difference between unconsciously absorbing programming and consciously choosing which influences to keep.

There are rules( biology, gravity, social structures). Borrowed scripts ( family expectations, cultural norms) and many more. But within that, we get to play, remix and invent.

So maybe the point isn’t to arrive at a final version of ourselves. The point is to keep experimenting, discarding what doesn’t fit, and embracing what does. To accept that we are always a remix-part environment, part choice, part accident- and that the beauty lies in how we arrange those pieces uniquely.

We may never be purely original, but we can be uniquely intentional. And perhaps that’s enough.