Recently, I've noticed many people discussing their favorite police procedural TV series, such as Criminal Minds and CSI. This type of conversation is repetitive and constant, and there is always someone who mentions how these shows have a negative impact on society by giving bad ideas to viewers. Most episodes of police procedural shows are based on actual crimes, and they aren't the original ideas of the writers anyway. There have been 108 billion people to live on our planet, and I'm left with one question: how many of our ideas are actually original?

Chuck Palahniuk is most famous for his novel Fight Club (1996), the story of an insomniac who meets an enigmatic man named Tyler Durden. Together, Durden and the unnamed protagonist create an underground fighting club for the use of psychotherapy. In the afterword of Fight Club, written nearly a decade after the novel's first release, Palahniuk explains the impact the novel and film ("Fight Club", 1999) have on his every day life. He admits that his friends' life experiences influenced the book, such as the real stories of  "Mike splicing porno into family movies" (215) and "Geoff pissing in soup as a banquet waiter" (215). A friend of Palahniuk's once worried, like Criminal Minds viewers, that such stories would evoke the reader to copycat. Palanhiuk insisted that he and his friends were "just blue-collar nobodies living in Oregon with public school educations" (215), and that there was nothing they came up with that "a million people weren't already doing" (215). Palanhiuk proves this to be true when he writes about a man pulling him aside, explaining how he was a waiter at a five-star restaurant, and loved how Palanhiuk depicted waiters spoiling food. Before Fight Club was even published, he and other servers had spoiled the food of celebrities.

Yesterday, a candidate running for Sterling's student council president mentioned that he had a unique new idea to make pep-rallies more exciting: surprising the school with one at the end of the day. I responded by recalling a teacher who made the same recommendation to me at the end of last year. The candidate thought that just because it was the first time he thought of this plan, it was completely modern and original, but it wasn't.

You may think you have a fresh, never-before-seen idea for a project, novel, or show, but in reality, it's already been done before. Every sentence you've ever spoken has been spoken before, every action you've ever taken has been taken before, and every idea you've ever come up with has been thought of by someone else. Murderers will always dump bodies in lakes, pep-rally ideas will always be recycled, and like Palanhiuk states in his afterword, "Waiters will always pee in the soup" (217).