I was recently coversing with my friend after a long time, and this time he who usually espouses ideas aplenty, had more to offer than could be comprehended by my little pea brain (laughs in self-deprecation). But after I bid my goodbyes, as I was staring out into the vast abyss of modern civilization as I rode home, I was gently experiencing a stream of thoughts, some of which escaped me immediately then, but whatever is left of that I’m frantically trying to pen down before I lose that as well.

So, coming back, these vast number of ideas that my friend was purging onto me over zealously, I was led to believe whatever they were could some day be viable enough to fruition before my eyes. But my cynical self got the better of me later on, as I couldn’t believe the things I’d heard could ever come into reality at all for one, and of course that would be too fantastical I guess. But stepping back and taking a look at the grander ethos, I was again led into an epiphany of an idea, that the whole world is brimming with it, and my friends’ was no different than what was happening at some pitching rounds in business or VC meetings, on various other parts of the world. On the contrary, I did feel uncomfortable in some weird sense that my friend could be having several ideas to the point of delusional prowess upon unchartered or unviable territory. Maybe given enough thought and time to those springing of ideas, they could evolve into something pragmatic and feasible.

The idea or as possible thought of a course of action, is rooted in history as being the seminal driver of some of the most fundamental constructs of human thought processes into coherent outlines of the sense of being. Originally what must have begun as the abstract, has today traversed into action plans, most of which are to further advancements or innovation. It could arise out of dreams, or experiences or just about anything where the person feels a pang or a gradual enlightening sense of being to a thought or a mental imagery.

‘Innovation’ is something I find myself kind of perturbed by, not only due to the pretentiousness it seems to foster, but also it’s place in current technological advancements, whether such forced innovation that is being brought upon industries or the market, helps us in any way other than increase the already heaving peer pressure in work environments and other such places alike. Such ‘innovation’ for the sake of it, maybe for gaining an upper hand in the market, or edging out competition is inane and only results in long term regressive motivations or actions. Rather, with practising some detachment from the toxic confines of such scenarios, maybe believing and putting ones own thoughts into acting upon those ideas, however abstract it may be at first would be the way to go to my mind. Atleast, from a historical context, it seems that that has been the case, where the legacy of inventors remains etched, even if with their fair share of embellishments.

Like I’d heard repeated several times throughout my educational voyage, having ideas anyone could come up with, only the ones that make it through it to reality would be the ones that ever mattered. But, I felt another twitch that ideas themselves held some inherent value, not exactly in a bad way that is. But it didn’t make me feel any better too, it was only a realisation that whatever idea a person might have throughout his lifetime, it is pretty much a dud unless they can back it up successfully with enough conceptual rigour that it could maybe sometime in the future be developed into something that could probably hold some value or improve upon an existing framework of technology.

Patents, for example do exactly that. With enough rigour of an idea, a successful invention is tied to the inventor’s technical prowess for the rest of their lives, even if their inventions never see the light of the day. But then comes the various kinds of ideas that people could have, not just technological ones. Where does that get registered other than someone’s personal journal or pitching events or meetings? Maybe there’s a certain value threshold to having worthy ideas, that ought to be held accountable by the authorization entities’ and individuals alike. But even when it comes to such advancements in technology, not every idea is held on patent by the individual(s) that came up with the thing, rather these days held by large business units or corporations. Nothing with that would or be possible to attempt to implement other than the holder, or with the persons’ rights being given via legal documents or monetary compensation. Then there is the whole clusterfuck of intellectual property and arm twisting and enforcing of such property of which the authority of whatever idea or invention has to commit towards to gain some kind of competitive advantage over their peers or the market. Some even adopt such practices into holding authority over such intellectual property as their sole business models and can just live off granting rights to their peers or other such communities so that somehow their licenses are what is ruling over a certain aspect of a technological field or any other field where their ideas can gain real world realisations and are being rewarded monetarily.

Working together as teams would be a contrasting nature of this practise, not just for the sake of granting licenses and IP to their realisers, but to promote the actual benefit that such an act would do, not just for the realisation of an idea but also for encouraging healthy business practises. Weaponising or monetising an idea is upto one’s own moral compass or ethical code they abide by.

Successful research & development would be a utopian reality if the practices of having solely authority over an invention and having the freedom to implement that in several other efficient ways were to be encouraged given granting of licenses and IP rights were to be made more open and economical. Instead, humongous time and resources are being dedicated to just hampering any such progress that should occur as a result of more cooperative, selfess work. Incentivising such research may also provide whatever growth an organisation or a community needs, as well as ends up encouraging its fellow people to venture into rather than stick to socio-economical safe zones, furthering such professions as having enough societal leverage to encourage reasonable resources and funding.

There’s this whole necessity to only work towards realising ideas that actually help in fostering growth of a community, or in a larger scale an enterprise, or a nation, into incremental development of their social, scientific, technological and economical norms. But what of the ideas that are only able to be pertained to obscure fields, which may or may not provide the immediate sleight of hand in some advancements required by certain organisations or communities? Are they actually worthy of pursuit and funding? What or who deems ideas that are worthy of pursuit? Maybe some require immediate planning and action, and some maybe not so imminent enough to obtain resource pooling, and just get tragically discarded into the bowels of a person’s mind or an organisation.

That is a complex issue to tackle which would warrant discussion with teams of experts maybe, but surely if such ideas are worthy of being pursued for the long term, they better be adequately funded or worked upon by teams that hold both consistent belief in their pursuit and are able to work on them consistently without any managerial or other interferences that might hamper their freedom within their organisations to experiment.

Coming to experimentation, must it be required for a person or a group of researchers to go about their work in weird, tacky or in oblique ways to try to bend the laws of mathematical constructs they’ve built themselves, they ought to be allowed the liberty of and it’s only reasonable to do so, and discouraging that would only be a waste of resources and money for both parties.

Some of that hard work over decades, done by various people over their lifetimes, may just fizzle out into oblivion in the current strata of rapid change in societies today, scientific research comes to mind, but may find a rebirth centuries later, however obscure it may seem at first, both the current work done by the work done and the future. But that is all probably just a shot in the dark, but the shot is to be taken nevertheless by those willing to persevere.

Consolidation in the way of centralising said technological advancements if any, being held by groups of people or corporations, would prove to be a bummer if in case the idea is better held in the hands of someone who is both willing to and having resources to implement said idea into reality.

That being said, it isn’t always a black or white kind of dichotomy we have here, it is essentially the way the world works, in the sense of how the human civilisation works its ways. Like most things, when there is an advantage, we’ll have a couple cons in there as well. Not only to my purely cynical disposition that is the case, but otherwise too, is such varied events of grey taking place all the time around me that even the optimist in me thinks it’s just reality, however equivocal at times it may seem.

So, what good are such varied ideas that one person with the intellectual capacity and cognitive capability has come up with due to his ablility to gather his thoughts, knowledge and other mental constructs? For one, only the ones capable and privileged enough to do so can be able to quip such things, and even then it’s only from their experiences and knowledge can they propel their mental thoughts and motives into forming a composed sense of gathering their accumulated emotions into ideas that they feel could be actually worthy of recursively growing from within their minds into taking form as implemented structures in our world. Failures may come in the form of unwieldy iterations and rejections and concomitant dejections, which we all must be willing to cope with and move on from onto the next.

Again I’m forced to think that abstract thought or ideas seem to pale heavily in significance compared with actual practical ones, and the fact that only individuals in their own minds are left to dwell in their complex theoretical abstract thoughts are just not any help in attaining realisable goals. But given that such thoughts too deserve to be encouraged among those who enjoy such endeavours, they are better left to their own selves and maybe given enough perserverance, form into something that could find solace in a mathematical equation thereby gaining some tangible fruition.

But the notion of several ideas forming concurrently, and with completely different goals, are to be witnessed with the passage of time, and the evolution of those ideas over time, if the thinker persists along with them that is. Having several of them might not necessarily bode a regressive outcome of results for the person, but it may just hamper the potential of driving just one of them into progress, rather than have all of them at once to end up in procrastination and redundancy. Not saying that it is certain to occur, but most times that tends to be the case, instead I find myself increasingly believing in the KISS principle and even more so with the UNIX philosophy, maybe as an unintended upshot stemming from working with such systems, and then there is always Occam’s razor to top it all off.

What would be really rewarding for both the individual with the idea, and their community is if they were to assert their goals that works well for the short-term as well as for the near future, having that kind of futuristic foolproof mechanism would also ensure that the actions are undertaken for the incremental evolution of the idea, or the prototype itself, thus enriching and inadvertently acting as an anchoring linchpin to their contemporaries and community.

Again, just merely having ideas about something wouldn’t necessarily propel a person towards achieving their goals, but if one persists in evolving them into actual viable, economical concepts, and are willing to conscientiously stride towards them, then maybe it’s only a matter of time before they witness their brain children taking form before them, maybe even before they leave their mortal selves if they are lucky enough.

But, whatever it is, may it provide the ikigai for the individual or people to further their work into achieving some satiation in firing of their neurons and hence the world’s collective human consciousness as a whole.