Orig. Publish Date : September 19, 2025ON : CREATIVEFUTURESTHE SOUNDTRACK: One Hour - Mauro B
On : Unconscious swiping & secondhand thoughts
Back in March (2025) I wrote a piece about what I referred to as creative integrity. It’s still sitting in the archive, but rereading it now feels like looking back at another lifetime.
At the time I was starting to try to diagnose why so much around me felt so lifeless. Why so much was arriving dull and recycled. At the same time, I was in the midst of a few pilot projects and navigating some partnership and collaboration discussions, as well as general creative discussion around the state of creative work, fashion, media, and culture at large.
A few of those experiences, looking back, were the first glimmers of the more formed clarity I’m sharing now across on:creativefutures. They offered some answers, but those answers raised even harder questions. And to be honest, they were difficult to sit with. I didn’t know what to make of them.
They left me trying to consciously define, perhaps for the first time, the lines between sharing and oversharing, between authorship versus contribution, between what makes something mine versus yours, and between being inspired by something or someone and extracting from it or them.
In the best cases, I was too often left wondering why I felt drained instead of filled up, unsafe to share ideas and thoughts openly, and generally feeling off after mere conversations.
In the worst cases, I watched people around me openly swipe clarity they hadn’t earned without asking, much less attribution. Taking and using what they felt like, from projects, from conversations, even from casual exchanges.
Multiple people in my own orbit mirrored back or publicly used ideas, distinct points of view, or clear frameworks I had shared with them as if they were their own. Not maliciously, I don’t think. But unconsciously, which is almost worse. Not one of them realized they’d crossed a line.
“It’s your own fault, Teodora”. Sure, in some ways, yes. Lessons were learned about quiet incubation, letting things root, and discernment.
But also, no it wasn’t. I started to notice a pattern, with each new instance leaving me with a growing feeling that this was bigger than my own experience.
Instead of staying stuck in resentment, I started to study it.
Why was it happening and why was it happening so often?
Further, how was it possible they didn’t have a clue?
I know what some of you are thinking — ideas are meant to be shared so they can spread.
Yes, but not like this.
As I noted in an earlier attempt at crystallizing this concept, I don’t believe that ideas can be owned, rather just expressed uniquely through our own, original lens. It’s that lens — the one made from the sum of your experience, talents, and developed point of view — that makes that expression and creation original.
There’s the obvious, visual swiping in creative work, of course — in design, art, writing, music. These are much easier to identify.
Most recently, I’ve seen countless Substack notes about writers’ work being co-opted and turned into yet another “original” commentary video on other platforms with zero attribution. I’ve seen several artists on social tread lightly, but sharing the unease of suspecting they’d been swiped from (even when it’s obvious). I’ve seen comedians calling out joke theft—a long-standing issue, but it’s been flaring again with TikTok and YouTube creators repackaging jokes as original bits. These are just a handful of a plethora of recent examples, with more popping up every day.
But what about the less obvious? How about...worldviews?
Well-formed and communicated opinions? Philosophies?
It’s harder to draw lines around this type of swiping, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. And it certainly doesn’t make it any less questionable when it does.
This kind of swiping is quieter, and in some ways more dangerous. It doesn’t just show up in our work — it seeps into how we define ourselves, what we say we care about, even who we think we are. We casually pick up perspectives from others and when the moment strikes, we jump to deploy them as if they were ours. But agreeing with an opinion doesn’t make it ours. Feeling lit up by a worldview doesn’t qualify as authorship. And adoption of a point of view without having formed it or run it through the wringer of our own experience makes it fall flat when wielded anyway.
Regardless of medium, whether visual or audio, words or brushstrokes, ideas or philosophies, being inspired by something doesn’t mean it’s ours to take forward, or to openly claim, replicate and share without pointing back to the source.
I read a great piece recently by Bechem Ayukon Substack: How to Brilliantly Articulate Your Thoughts. In it, he heavily references one of Joseph Tsar’s videos where he outlines two things that run rampant today:
Absorbing ideas without first filtering them through our own value prism.
Parroting ideas from conversations, articles, books, or other sources without digesting them first. He calls these “secondhand thoughts.”
Beachem’s expansion on Tsar’s “secondhand thoughts” is incredibly helpful for the purpose of the point I’m trying to make.
Tsar warns against parroting ideas from books, articles, or conversations without digesting them first. He calls them "secondhand thoughts", and once you start noticing them, you see them everywhere.
Usually, I'd read something interesting and immediately start incorporating it into my conversations as if I'd come up with it myself. Not consciously. I wasn't trying to plagiarise. I just hadn't learned the difference between consuming an idea and owning it.
The difference is personal engagement. When you own an idea, you've tested it against your experience. You've found the places where it works and where it breaks down. You've made it yours by running it through your actual life.
Borrowed ideas feel hollow because THEY ARE hollow. They haven't been tempered by your judgment or enriched by your experience. They're just intellectual hand-me-downs.
(Attribution in practice: Bechem crediting Tsar, me crediting Bechem.)(Also, I couldn’t have put it better myself. Which is why I didn’t try to and I referenced it instead.)What’s missing after the spark is a pause.
A moment to ask: am I letting this inspiration ignite something original in me, or am I replicating it and treating it as mine?
And not just a momentary pause.
Time.
Time to let it marinate with the rest of our experiences and ideas.
To intertwine with other sparks.
To feed our own originality, instead of shortcutting someone else’s clarity and dressing it up as our own.
Being inspired or activated by others, their work, and their way of seeing the world is one of the best parts of being human and a big reason behind our instinct to gather. Community, conversation, and exchange are where sparks happen. It’s how we expand our own ways of seeing the world and grow our awareness, exposure, and knowledge banks.
But what we do next with a spark someone else sets off in us matters, and I’m not sure we still understand how much.
This pause can change how we operate in the world, the quality and originality of our work, and our relationships to others. And this type of creative integrity isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the baseline for originality, for trust, and for rebuilding both the culture of creative work and a more general cultural landscape in dire need of new energy.
This isn’t about paranoia or self-policing. But we do need to raise our standards—first for ourselves and then each other.
It’s the only way we can all show up fully as ourselves and produce the ideas and work that are uniquely ours, collaborate in ways that feel good not draining, and get back to a creative landscape we don’t have to brace to operate in.
If not for the sake of creative culture, then we should consider the impact of this on the long arc of our own work. Who wants to look back at the end and see a trail of other people’s ideas?
And if not for any of that, then simply because memories are long and the world is small. Trust me.
xT
a note on creative integrity
This work was made to be shared in essence, not extracted in form.These words, ideas, images are shared to inspire, not to be copied, lifted, swiped, repackaged, or borrowed otherwise without care. If they resonate, let them spark something original in you.