Perhaps you've heard the phrase, "There is nothing new under the sun."  Believe it or not, this line comes from the book of Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible.  It was written by a person who, like many a philosopher and thinker, had had a good deal of leisure time to reflect on the meaning of existence.
     And that was his conclusion:  although every successive generation of human beings develops new art, literature, and technology, all of these are, at best, reiterations of those that have proceeded them.  This is not to discount the creative force between each iteration, for it is singularly magnificent.  Yet it is to underscore the futility, the hidden futility of these endeavors, that in the biggest possible picture they are merely clones, parallels, and duplicates of something else.  And what's the point?
     So, the writer observes, it is this:  we will only find genuine newness when we look for more than that of which we think newness consists.