[bjz_]

Yeah, it's not an uncommon to feel this way, especially if you've not learned the humanities formally. Pretty much the first thing I learned in art theory at university was how much art depends on influence and appropriation, and that it's important to accept and embrace this. It was a hard lesson to learn as a young person striving to be original, but it's served me really well.

Even as I now move into programming, computer science, and industrial programming language research, I'm still grateful for that small amount of art theory I did at university. You don't need to try to be original - rather it's important to seek wide and varied influences, develop your sense of taste, and from that will flow seemingly unique and varied insights.

[rwnspace]

"The key to originality is hiding your sources."

Adding on to this, the evolution of modern music, particularly sampling and DJing, is a very visceral example of how originality doesn't just appear in what sources you approach, it can also come from the /way/ you approach them.

[setr]

If you take enough sources, any particular combination of them is very likely to be unique -- but anyways uniqueness never mattered; everything interesting in CS was discovered in the 70s. Even cloning & updating a forgotten paper can be of extremely high value.

The bigger risk is that by not knowing your sources, you end up repeating the same work from the same start, and end contributing little