Breaking the Cycle: Escaping the Repetitive Human Experience and Striving for Originality

Every time we think things will be different this time and then we deal with precisely the same nonsense. The only thing that changes is the actors playing the roles, but the story is the same. There may be slight variations here and there. It's not Jerusalem, and it's New York. It's not winter, and it's summer. It's not a daughter but a son. It's not a blonde but a brunette—nevertheless, so much déjà vu.

When you're starting your life, and when I say that, I mean in your late teens and early twenties, you're horrified, but as you get older, all you can do is sigh and face slap yourself. Here we go again. Same shit, once again.

The spiritual among us will say we need to learn the lesson. The pessimists will say this is expected in a world full of stupid idiots. What alarms me is how unoriginal it all is. They are different people from different places and have the same ridiculous story. How is it possible with so many inhabitants on our planet that, there are so few scripts? It's just as bad as Hollywood, where many of the movies have almost the same script or computer games where the storyline is often similar over and over.

So this mighty omnipresent and omnipotent God lacks creativity? Or better yet, has only as much creativity as Hollywood? Or am I focusing on the smallest part of creation, the human experience? We're so important, but there are so many places on this planet where we don't even exist.

The stories would be mostly the same if you watched a couple of gerbils in a cage. He bit her, she bit him, then she bit her, and then these three bit each other. What else can they do in this cage?

He cheated on her, she cheated on him, and she beat him, and they beat each other. He fell out of love with her, and she fell in love with her. Maybe we're just humans in a cage called the human experience. A tiny and limited place, so our stories are so repetitive.

But then, when humans do great things, the cage of human experience seems to break a bit. Great inventions, great travels. Great calamities. Nobody can say Hitler or Stalin were unoriginal. Evil men, yes, but not unoriginal. Just like Mother Teresa was not unoriginal. What about the Beatles? Not unoriginal. But of course, they also had their typical cage issues, broken hearts, sorrows, or even getting murdered, which until recently was not such an original thing—getting killed while out and about was very much part of the human experience. In pre-ancient Greece, people lived in caves and had a 60% survival rate. Many of their skeletons were found with crushed skulls. If you wanted to dance around the prairies, you had a high chance of having your skull crushed. Today that would make for a somewhat original story unless you lived in a place where things like that happen, such as Israel during times of terror.

So the fundamental human experience is just as unoriginal as that of gerbils in a cage, but things become extraordinary when we elevate the human experience by doing original things. Such as being the first surgeon to do a heart transplant, but back home, his wife might have bitched at him as in many other marriages, or his teenage kids thought him just another lame adult. But when it came to hearts, he was the original of the original. And that's where a gerbil cannot compete with us.

Perhaps it's not about learning the lesson but about remaining unaffected by the human experience while aiming for lofty original outcomes. Surrounded by haters, you ignore them and focus on creating something wonderful and original instead of being another gerbil in the human experience cage.