You seem to have forgotten that Black Sheep Are Still Sheep. You’re using “what they tell you” to define your value system.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with valuing originality, or even mere novelty. But if you value it because You Never Had Anyone Tell You To Do It...
Consider: if we didn’t have Dark Enlightenment dumbasses like Land and Moldbug shitting everywhere and begging people to join their little cults, they aren’t exactly hard beliefs to stumble upon but they are hard ones to entertain for any length of time.
If you only value “useful” originality, which isn’t a trivial modification, nor an unfair one, you have to allow that without having your work sanity checked or tested, it’s impossible for any truly original concept to be sorted into “useful” and “useless” categories.
And unfortunately, if you happen to find a useless one brings you things monkeys CRAVE, you could be the next Jim Jones by the time you realize there’s no actual utility in the idea. Whoops, you fucked up.
You have forgotten that the counterculture is still moving parallel to the mainstream, just OPPOSITE. Whatever you value here at depth, you’re mistaking it for “whatever everyone else ISN’T doing” instead of building your own identity the way you want it to be, from whatever parts appeal to you.
And then, when you consider the options available to them, you end up weighting “dumb, self destructive idea” near equivalent to “dumb but at least harmless and actually probably helpful idea” because one is mainstreamed, has this cult of identity battened to it like a leech, and the other does not.
That’s a classic case of bad priorities. If everyone says “don’t drink magic methyl” and you do it anyway, you will win a Darwin Award. If you weight drinking magic methyl and drinking water close to each other just because water is mainstream and magic methyl is not, you deserve to win a Darwin Award.
Stop paying attention to “everyone else” and start focusing on what you want. And if what you want is to be completely unique and individual, remember that millions have done the opposite of what the mainstream told them to do. Counterculture predates you, probably predates Western civilization. The equivalents of goths and hippies probably lived in Uruk, rolling their eyes at each other and trying to capture the sheeple’s attention.
If you really, really want to be completely unique and original, though... well. Good luck. Not “nothing original under the sun” good luck, but “the majority of original actions will always be actions of unthinkable stupidity, like kissing a running sawblade or something”.
I’m not a conservative individual at all, but it is an unarguable truth that most new and innovative ideas one can ever have will be dismissed by the person to come up with them IMMEDIATELY on account of the actor would no longer be able to hear their friends mocking them for doing such a stupid thing. Source: your intrusive fucking thoughts.
