I’ve been thinking about the nature of thoughts and how they’re not born in a vacuum, but shaped by the social fields we navigate like family, education, and the media. This, then to me, makes every thought I have a reflection of previous thoughts, or at least an amalgamation of a myriad of other thoughts, not all of them my own. How then, can I be certain that any thought I have is an original thought and not a derivative of other people’s thoughts mixed in with what I believe to be my own thoughts?