Most of us live a monotonous life. Those for whom every day is different, who get to experience something new every single time they get out of their house, or who have jobs that require them to do something else every day, are few, and some of them are lucky.
We're not those people. The majority of us spend our lives in a loop of repetition, doing more or less the same things again and again, with some variation here and there in order to not get too bored.
Monotony isn't always bad. It can also become routine, and routine can be really good. It can help a lot with your sleeping patterns, it can help you make consistent progress over a long period of time, it can help you build something great little by little, it can help you create long lasting relationships that are meaningful and important to you, and so on.
But when you're a content creator, monotony can be a bad thing. You don't get to experience everything there is to experience, which means that some of your ideas will have to come from what other people do.
You watch movies about fictional characters that fight villains and live dangerous lives. You watch YouTube creators that get to travel or create something unique, more or less, every day, because they are in a position in which they can afford all these experiences.You read books about people who started or stopped wars, who thought about great things, who created entire philosophies and tried to find the meaning of life, and you borrow from their thoughts and their actions in order to create something yourself.
As a person who's life revolves around repetitive activities, you can't always come up with something new and original to talk about. And even if you do, something you want to talk again about a topic you already approached in the past, because you got a greater understanding of something involving it, or you went through something in your life that changed your perspective about that particular thing.
Sometimes you just don't know what else to talk about and so you decide to create a piece of content related to something you already created in the past.
Other times you get a great idea that you consider unique and great, but it turns out that it's nothing but a different variation of something you already created, and so you have to decide whether you give up on your idea, or if you go on with it and risk being "repetitive".
Monotony is part of our lives, and that's normal. What most of us do every day will be repeated over and over again, for a very long time. And although we get to experience something new now and then, most of the time we just live the same life, more or less, every day.
This should be taken as a fact, and it should help you get rid of the feeling of "shame" that you get when you publish the same type of article or make the same type of video. We can't always be innovative. Sometimes we're stuck with a formula that works, and that's okay.
Therefore, it's okay to take inspiration from others, and to use their ideas for something we want to do ourselves. And it's also okay to use our own older ideas to get inspired for other things, even if what we create now won't be as different from our original idea as we might like.
Don't be ashamed of repeating yourself.