The older you get, the more unoriginality starts to pop out at you. More specifically, you're able to pick up on whether or not something that your seeing or hearing is new content to you, or if it's old news.
An easy example of this would be storylines. Think of how many movies that you (anyone bored enough to read my stuff) have seen in your life, or books that you've read. You'll surely find one story that reminds you of one prior, which carried over some elements from yet another story proceeding it.
Such a thing makes the bold ones among us hungry to try and bring a completely unseen concept to the world, regardless of the field of interest. It's a particularly interesting thing to watch unfold on the internet, where many different individuals use different platforms to try and sell merchandise and content that only they can provide. YouTube alone is such a place where idea entrepreneurs have gathered in an attempt to show the world the things that have been rattling around their head, looking for the right vehicle to escape through.
While you have these kinds of folks, there exist the opposite end of the spectrum, namely those who actually thrive off of unoriginality. The first example that sprints to mind are the countless remakes of old television shows & cartoons, some of which gain a movie spin-off. These often see little care and effort, which is often visible in the final product. Weak movie adaptations are often considered a negligible practice by many, where cartoon remakes and movies are concerned. Many think that if it's a product aimed at children, then it really breaks down to how pretty the pictures on the screen are, rather than what the quality of the material is.
There are the special breed of people who attempt knock-offs of certain brands that exists. I remember once buying a wallet that I thought was a Calvin Klein, but the C in the logo was actually a G. Was Calvin's brother, Galvin Klein, trying to cash in on his brother's icon? Chances are a little better that someone was taking an iconic image and using it for their personal gain.
After thousands of years of human thought and creation, it's harder today than it ever was to make or be something original, and tomorrow it will be even harder. This dilemma has crossed my mind before. Maybe what I have to say has been said millions of times before, probably better, but don't I need to think and say what I'm thinking so that I truly acknowledge it? So that I build off of it? We need to look at ideas for ourselves, even if they have been examined thousand and millions of times before because maybe we're the one to see something else. What if there was something that all of those other people missed? Another route that a person can take that will open new doors and new possibilities?
Progress is a very slow thing, so trying to be and do something new isn't something that happens overnight. There is never even a promise that the fruits of your labor will yield anything. How scary would it have been if the first man to think that the sun didn't revolve around the world kept his mouth shut, and never inspired the next man in the chain of that long struggle of disproving the geocentric theory. A new idea can change and has changed the world, even if it takes decades to see the effect.
