You Share Other People's Thoughts Because You Don't Have Any of Your Own.

Your Instagram stories are just screenshots of other people's tweets. Your "thoughts" on current events are reworded takes from that video essay you watched. Your opinions on art, music, politics, relationships—all of it is borrowed, curated and copied.

You don't have original thoughts. You have a collection of other people's thoughts that you've assembled into something that vaguely resembles a personality.

And deep down, you know it.

That's why you're so anxious when someone asks "what do you think?" in a conversation. That's why you panic when you have to have an opinion that isn't pre-approved by your algorithm. That's why you default to "I don't know, what do YOU think?" and then just agree with whatever they say.

You buy books because they look good on your shelf or because everyone else is reading them. You take pictures, post them and add them to your Goodreads.

But you don't actually read them. Or if you do, you don't actually think about them.

You read so you can say you read. You read so you can participate in the discourse. You read so you can add another book to your yearly goal and post your little wrapped infographic at the end of the year.

But you're not actually engaging with ideas. You're not sitting with concepts that challenge you. You're not forming your own interpretations or conclusions. You're just consuming content so you can talk about consuming it.

When someone asks you what a book is about, you give them the Goodreads summary. When they ask what you thought about it, you give them the consensus opinion from the reviews. When they ask what it made you think about, you panic.

---

You watch a three-hour video essay about some movie or cultural phenomenon, and suddenly you're an expert. Suddenly you have "thoughts." Suddenly you're posting long captions about themes, symbolism and cultural commentary.

But they're not your thoughts and you're not analyzing anything.

Someone brings up that movie in conversation and you light up. Finally, something you can talk about! And you launch into your "take"—the same take from the video essay, delivered with the confidence of someone who came up with it themselves.

Maybe people believe you. Maybe they're impressed. Maybe they think you're smart and insightful.

But you know the truth. You've trained yourself to absorb and repeat instead of think and create. You've convinced yourself that understanding someone else's argument is the same as having your own. That being able to explain someone else's perspective means you have a perspective.

It doesn't.

---

Your taste in music? Spotify told you what to like. Your fashion sense? TikTok showed you what to wear. Your political opinions? Twitter fed them to you. Your aesthetic? Pinterest curated it for you.

Everything you think makes you unique is just a very specific combination of algorithmic recommendations that you've accepted as your identity.

You're not into cottagecore because you independently decided you loved that vibe. You're into it because the algorithm showed you cottagecore content and you passively absorbed it as part of who you are now.

You don't have strong opinions about that celebrity drama. You just have the opinion that got the most engagement in your feed, the one that felt safest to adopt, the one that your little corner of the internet agreed was correct.

Do you know the scariest part about this? I think it's the fact that you've stopped questioning whether your thoughts are actually yours or if they're just the loudest voices in your digital echo chamber.

---

You Can't Form an Opinion Without Checking What Everyone Else Thinks First.

Something happens—a new album drops, a celebrity does something controversial, a movie comes out and your first instinct isn't to form your own opinion. No, God forbid. It's to check what everyone else is saying.

You scroll through Twitter to see what the consensus is. You check the reviews. You watch the reaction videos. You read the think pieces. And only after you've absorbed everyone else's takes do you decide what YOUR take is.

Except it's not your take. It's just the take that seems most popular or most defensible or most likely to get you likes.

You can't read a book without checking to see if other people thought it was good. You can't listen to an album without seeing what critics said about it.

You can no longer sit with your own reactions, trust your own instincts or have a thought that hasn't been pre-approved by the internet.

And when you DO have an opinion that goes against the majority? You don't voice it. You don't defend it. You just quietly change it to match everyone else's. Because being right according to the internet is more important than being honest with yourself.

You're so afraid of having the "wrong" opinion that you've stopped having opinions at all.

---

Your Conversations Are Just References.

You don't actually talk about things. You talk AROUND things using references, quotes, memes, and other people's observations.

Maybe your friend mentions they're going through a breakup and instead of offering genuine comfort or asking real questions, you quote that one tweet about attachment styles.

Someone else is stressed about work and you hit them with a TikTok audio about hustle culture. Someone's having an existential crisis and you send them a screenshot of someone else's Instagram caption about finding meaning.

You communicate entirely in borrowed language. But what about in person? In real conversations where you can't just send a link or quote a tweet? You're lost. You don't know how to articulate anything original. You don't know how to express something that doesn't come with the safety net of "well, someone smart said this, so it must be valid."

You're so used to letting other people do the thinking for you that you've destroyed your own ability to think.

Your conversations are like poorly assembled collages—bits and pieces of other people's ideas, hastily glued together to form something that resembles a point of view.

But it's not a point of view. It's a mood board.

---

You think that because you consume a lot of content, you're cultured. Because you watch video essays, you're educated. Because you follow smart people on Twitter, you're smart.

Following someone brilliant doesn't make you brilliant.

You're drowning in information and starving for actual knowledge. You're surrounded by ideas but you've never sat with one long enough to truly make it your own. You've never wrestled with a concept until you came to your own conclusion. You've never disagreed with something popular and had to articulate why.

You've created an entire identity around being well-informed, well-read, well-versed. But you're none of those things. You're just well-fed by an algorithm.

You're like a vessel that content passes through, leaving you exactly as empty as you were before.

---

I think the real reason you don't have your own thoughts is that you're terrified of being wrong.

If you repeat someone else's take and it turns out to be bad, you can distance yourself from it. "I mean, that's what everyone was saying." "That's what the article said." "That's what I read somewhere."

But if you form your own opinion and it's unpopular or incorrect or poorly thought out? That's on you. That's your failure. That's proof that you're not as smart as you want people to think you are.

So you play it safe. You wait for the consensus. You adopt the opinions of people smarter than you and pass them off as your own.

You're scared of being stupid, challenged and having to defend something that came from your own brain instead of someone else's.

---

All these makes you a boring person because there's nothing original about you.

You're like a compilation. A greatest hits album of other people's thoughts. A Pinterest board in human form.

People can sense it. They can sense when someone doesn't have depth. They can sense when someone is just faking it based on a script they've memorized from the internet.

That's why your conversations feel flat. That's why people don't seem that interested in your opinions. That's why you feel like you're always on the outside of deeper discussions.

Because you're not actually saying anything. You're just repeating things and people can feel the difference.

Being around you is like being around someone who only speaks in movie quotes. Sure, the quotes might be good. But there's no person behind them. There's just a collection of references.

You're very good at identifying and sharing the best of what other people create. But you've never created anything yourself. You've never put forward an idea that's vulnerable to criticism because it came from you.

You're the friend who always knows the best restaurants but has never cooked a meal. The one who has opinions on everyone's art but has never made any.

---

The Internet Has Made You Intellectually Lazy

It's so easy now. You can have an opinion on anything within thirty seconds of googling it. You can sound informed about topics you know nothing about by reading the first three paragraphs of a Wikipedia article.

You never have to sit with "I don't know." You never have to do the work of actually learning something deeply. You never have to think for yourself when you can just crowdsource your opinions from people who've already done the thinking.

I mean, why struggle to form your own opinion when someone smarter has already formed it for you? Why read the whole book when you can watch a summary? Why think through a complex issue when you can just adopt the take that got the most likes?

---

Strip away all the borrowed thoughts, all the curated opinions, all the adopted perspectives. What's left?

What do you actually know what you think about things? What do you believe? What do you value?

Or have you been acting as someone else's personality for so long that you've forgotten you're supposed to have one of your own?


You probably can't answer that. Because you've never spent enough time alone with your own thoughts to figure out who you are underneath all the content consumption.

You've been so focused on seeming interesting that you've forgotten to actually BE interesting.

Being interesting requires having your own thoughts. Your own weird perspectives. Your own strange connections. Your own half-formed ideas that might be wrong but are at least yours.

But you don't have those. You have other people's fully-formed, peer-reviewed, algorithmically-approved thoughts that you're presenting as your own.

---

You know why you really don't form your own opinions? It's not just about being wrong. It's about the work.

Thinking is hard. Coming to your own conclusions requires effort, time and the willingness to be wrong or uncertain (put your damn ego aside)

It's so much easier to let someone else do that work and then just adopt their conclusions.

But the struggle IS the point. The discomfort of not knowing, of being uncertain, of having to think through something difficult—that's where actual growth happens. That's where you develop your own voice, your own perspective, your own way of seeing the world.

By outsourcing all of that to the internet, you're not just being lazy. You're robbing yourself of the chance to develop into a person with actual depth.

People can tell you don't have your own thoughts. They can tell you're just regurgitating things you've read. They can tell there's nothing original about you.

And even if they can't tell, you know. You know you're empty. You know you're hollow. You know that beneath the curated exterior, there's nothing substantial.

And that knowledge is eating at you. That's why you keep consuming more content, curating more takes, sharing more thoughts that aren't yours. Because if you stop, if you're quiet for even a moment, you'll have to face the emptiness.

You'll have to confront the fact that you don't know who you are or what you think because you've never bothered to find out.

---

Hi, if you're new here, my name is Feifei. I ghostwrite Romance Novels, Newsletters, Emails and Social Contents for Founders, brand execs, personal brands, romance authors and literally anyone who wants to build an audience, convert them to sales, or get their story written but just can't write. Reach out to me via email: idowuf42@gmail.com.

---

PS—If you want to learn how to have original thoughts, read this:

If you would also like to browse my ghostwriting services, click here and here