Sometimes I wonder if I have ideas of my own, or if all ideas are produced from consuming the ideas of others. This applies to everyone else. Well, good scientists do admit that they stand on the shoulders of giants, no shame in that. Still I question, when reading a thought-provoking conversation or article, am I actually coming up with anything reasonably unique, anything to add, or am I just going with the flow? (Lurking can seem unusually productive, especially in more intellectual spaces.) I thought, if we leave some time for ourselves to process these ideas, maybe then we can form our own. But are they really our own, or do we just each have a different reference pool we mould things from?
If we think of memes (the original definition as an unit of information, not the "internet meme") as something with their own life cycles, we could come to the conclusion of a “memetic evolution”, where each person discussing the idea acts as a “memetic operator" (analogous to a genetic operator in a genetic algorithm) capable of selecting, reproducing, recombining, or mutating an idea.
In fact, it is highly likely that someone else has came up with the same, or a similar idea to what I proposed now. They might have approached it in a different way, or connected it to a different idea.
In the end, the multiplicity of an idea is not necessarily a bad thing, rather, it shows the strength or fitness of the idea. Just look at social media and virulent behaviour, if they are not afraid of amplifying the same message over and over, why should you, especially if it is something you may find valuable? Also, if you discover others saying something similar to what you want to express, you just found someone with a similar mindset to you.
Update 2024/09/01: seems like the worry of accidentally coming up with something already existing has some merit; I accidentally re-invented the same concept as transactional analysis (the psychoanalytic theory). Glad I figured that out before I started passing it off as my own idea.