In a recent biology class, the professor told us, very coarsely paraphrased:
"Darwin didn't invent the idea of evolution out of nowhere. He built upon his grandfather's ideas about adaptation and evolution, built upon other philosophers' interpretations of animal evolution, and compiled it all together with his own observations and conclusions. He was afraid to present what he found until much later in life; when he finally did present it to scientists in London, another renowned scientist in the audience mused, 'wow, it's been there all along. There's the age-old idea of adaptation, there's natural selection, and there's speciation... how come we never thought to put everything together this way before? It's been here all along.'"
I look at things I've experienced or heard about and couldn't help but think, wow, it's been here all along. So much knowledge has lived in books forever, and so much human experience has been there too.
There have been very few breakthroughs in history on the scale of GPT or the steam engine, the kind that come along and change everything. But even these changes emerge from new combinations and incremental improvements to existing ideas that suddenly become powerful.
Most of the things we come across are already out there, we just need to be aware that they exist, know how they work to a reasonable extent, know when or when not to apply something, and know how to combine them for a new situation.
Most human experiences and advice are already on the internet or in books. The problem is that many accounts are exaggerated or unrepresentative of the population, but they are there nonetheless. Whenever I encounter a new experience that throws off my understanding of the world and emotions a bit, I try to connect the dots to words I've heard before, and many times, they connect. But still, it's one thing to hear about something, but it hits much deeper when you experience it firsthand. Nevertheless, that experience has likely already been captured somewhere on the internet.
Most knowledge is certainly already there. Even in a domain like tech, you see concepts and frameworks that seem really fancy and new, if you just look a little more carefully, it very likely turns out, somebody in the 1980s, or earlier at Xerox PARC, was also facing analogous problems and came up with solutions that still carry over today.
But the scenarios change. The people change, the environment changes, so, we need to always add twists to existing solutions to make things work today. And new connections are made between dots, and, much more rarely, actually meaningful dots are discovered, and all of a sudden we are back to the drawing board rethinking many things.
We are in a forever evolution, of knowledge, experience, and humanity. Many things have been here all along, but they can be recombined with new dots, and the outcome can shine in a completely different way.