Originality is Dead, so Why Create?

Sam Cavalcanti
2 min readApr 8, 2024
An illustration of a lightbulb shaped like a sillouette of a face in profile view, where the lightbulb’s fillaments are the person’s brain, symbolizing new ideas.

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Here I am, back at a Medium blog I created about five years ago, trying to turn it into something more than a glorified diary. I fought the idea of creating (or returning to) a blog for several reasons:

1) At first glance, it has a similar energy to people who create podcasts because they like the sound of their own voice (Seriously, Bernie?),

2) I despise social media and the idea of marketing myself to gain an audience,

3) AI (or other fellow humans) will probably steal anything I write anyway, and

4) Everything has been thought before. Everything has been written. There are no new ideas and I have nothing to say that has not been said before.

Now, as you may have assumed from the title of this article, number four is the focus of this piece. And I shall argue against my own argument.

First and foremost, repeated stories have value. Screenplays that are adapted from novels have the potential to add layers of meaning and interpretation through a visual Medium (TM) (You get it? Because the website is called Medium), not to mention these adaptations provide an opportunity for new audiences to meet a story that might not have been familiar to them.

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Sam Cavalcanti

I'm Sam (they/she). From Brazil. Now in L.A. I post when I remember to. No AI content ever.