October 17, 2025
Here’s a thought experiment that I always return to, whenever I start wondering about the future of writing, arts, or society in general: try to picture being the inventor of the spoon.
Now, I don’t know if the spoon has a quote-unquote inventor, or if it does, it’s someone we can identify (the internet says the earliest spoons date back to prehistoric times). That’s beside the point. Just imagine that there was a time in human history when people ate foods of liquid or viscous nature without a spoon. The simplest, most elegant, most logical shape for the tool of eating liquid dishes with solid parts (straws are the best for plain liquids). It doesn’t even make sense to think of any other shape that a spoon could have, yet it had to be invented. Someone had to come up with the idea. But once you see it, once you hold a spoon in your hand and use it for its intended purpose, it seems like the most obvious thing in the world. “How could people not think of the spoon when they were presented with a bowl of soup? It just makes the most sense!”
But that’s the entire human history, boiled down to the invention of one utensil. Everything seems obvious in hindsight; every invention, every mathematical formula, every story trope, every societal action or inaction. Yet this obviousness only starts after the moment of invention, and that Eureka moment is reserved, generally, to one individual.
I keep trying to picture what the future will look like, or more modestly, the future of storytelling. I would like to be the guy who invented the next “spoon” in storytelling, but it’s way more likely that I’ll just witness this event and happily get used to the newer, better utensil we were blessed with.
With the benefit of hindsight, one thing is certain: there has not been a new spoon in a long time.
Syd.