It was 11:00 am and I sat on my couch, wondering what I should do. My parents were still asleep. I didn’t have work today. So, I decided to go this little infamous bakery called Bourke Street Bakery, which was located 10 minutes from my house.

I arrived at the store and I wasn’t actually sure what to order. I can tell you they have this thing called Bread. It is a bakery after all. After thinking for a bit, I decided to order a beef pie and coffee. I sat down and guess what was in front of me. It was a newspaper! Mind you, it wasn’t like a ‘tablet’ newspaper but an actual ‘newspaper’ newspaper if I could even use ‘newspaper’ as an adjective. So, here am I with a beef pie, a cup of coffee and a newspaper. The only thing missing from the picture is me having a Sherlock Holmes hat and a twirly moustahce.

I don’t actually feel old but this little bakery place had this 1960s vibe about it and its common colour scheme is dark brown. It’s actually been a long time since I held a physical newspaper in my hand, let alone read it. When I was younger, I used to only read three things. One was the sports (football) section, no surprise there. Another was the entertainment (it was about celebrities, I don’t know why I bothered reading about all the latest gossip, ew). Last but not the least, I read the comics section which was really the best bit out of the whole newspaper. Forget politics and current events guys, comics is where it’s really at.

Wind the clocks, the newspaper changed to a more fast paced, concise and ‘Flipboard’ format which means the content gets updated almost every other minute rather than the traditional format which gets a refresh daily. I wrote about appreciating the things of the old a while back but these new ways of reading news isn’t actually bad. The human experience is all about looking for new experiences. Basking in the glory of the old days will have you labelled as ‘old-fashioned’, ‘outdated’ and ‘trapped mentality’ because of the inability to usher in the current era.

Can I ask you this though, is what we do truly new?

The latest gaming craze (oh yes, I’m talking about it even though I hate it), the Pokemon Go is a perfect example of us adoring a new thing. Just look at the game! It has augmented reality, GPS detection features and all these other sweet features (by sweet, I mean feeding the Pokemons candy, I know, I’m hillarious). That was why it became popular, or so we thought. The augmented reality bit turned out to be quite a flash and bang gimmick. Soon, most people turned it off to conserve phone battery and concentrated on what the 20-year old original game was about, collecting all the Pokemon.

The latest Star Wars movie, ‘The Force Awakens’ became a pop culture phenomenon and citizens of the Resistance will tell you that it’s so much better than the prequels! No more Jar Jar Binks! No more overuse of flashy CGI! Finally, a sensible plot but wait, the Republic has something to say! It’s too much like the original move, ‘Star Wars: A New Hope’. As big a fan as I am of Star Wars, I can’t help but agree, yes there are lots of elements of ‘The Force Awakens’ borrowed from ‘A New Hope’ but people don’t care. It felt good to have the feeling of old Star Wars again.

Perhaps, you don’t know or really don’t care about Pokemon Go or Star Wars but think about it. Most things we do aren’t actually new but rather another form of escapism. The stories we love are most often a rehashed and repackaged story that is infused with a different perspective on telling it. The songs you hear (let’s not talk about the top 40 songs, yuck) are most often about love and sorrow with a different melody attached to it. The events that you see in the news: the wars, the social injustice, the polictical outrage, the corruption and the accidents, you can search the archives for a 1940s newspaper and I can assure you the same sentiment is there. The characters, tools and context may be different but there will be that sense of familiarity.

So, why the urge of the human race to search for new experiences when in essence, it all seems a bit familiar? I can tell you a little bit about how the brain works with secretion of neurotransmitters but really, we are all trying to get closer to the truth. That’s why we have different perspectives and melodies of telling our life experiences because with every passing second, they uncover a different facet of what we are seeking for; happiness. As Aristotle puts it, “Happiness is the meaning of and purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”

In the search for the truth and perhaps happiness, we are often tempted to do away with the old, ignore history and focus on the current tidings. Funnily enough, when we are stuck or in need of a different outlook on life, we go back to where we come from or what we are good at.

We go back to our roots because that’s where our memory is the strongest. The archives of news and billions of data is nothing in comparison to your memory because each and every single one of those memories is in relation to you. It’s where life’s  greatest lessons are stored. Just because it feels archaic, it doesn’t mean it’s not good. On the contrary, when we remember our past and reflect on it, little by little, I believe that’s when we truly create new experiences.

New not because it’s different but because it came as a result of us learning what matters.

Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colours. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.

Terry Pratchett