We talk about creativity as if it comes from some hidden spark inside us. Something original. Something untouched and purely our own.
But when we look closer, the story changes.
Everything we create begins long before we put pen to paper or make a decision.
It begins in the experiences we carry. The people we’ve listened to. The ideas we’ve borrowed, reshaped, and slowly made our own.
Even the most original thinkers aren’t creating from nothing. They are creating from memory. From influence.From the stories that left a mark big enough to follow them through life.
AI works the same way. It draws from patterns, examples, data, and what has already been said. It doesn’t replace creativity. It reveals something we often overlook:
Creativity is not isolation. Creativity is connection.
When we create, whether it’s a drawing, a paragraph, a decision, or a new direction in our lives, we are pulling from the world around us. From the books we’ve read.
The conversations that changed us. The moments that stayed long after they happened.
And maybe that’s the point.
Our creativity isn’t proof that we stand apart from the world. It’s proof that we’re shaped by it.
What matters is not whether an idea is completely original. What matters is what we choose to do with it, how we shape it, how we let it shape us in return.
In the end, the things we create, our work, our choices, our stories, become a reflection of everything that has touched us along the way.
That doesn’t make our creativity less valuable. It makes it more human.
