Originality On Life Support

By Proma Ajoy

Remember when memories stayed memories?

When you could revisit a song from ten years ago and it hit you like a soft punch to the gut? When watching an old movie brought back this quiet ache- because it held something time couldn’t touch? Back then, looking back in the past felt rewarding. Now, it just feels exhausting. 

Before we even get a chance to miss something, it’s already been remade, repackaged, auto-tuned, splashed with bad CGI, and served to us in 4K Ultra HD.

A memory shouldn’t need a facelift.

When I heard that Harry Potter is being remade into a series - with a whole new cast - I paused. Why? Why do we need a reboot of a series that ended just over a decade ago?

We grew up with those characters. We graduated with them. And now, suddenly, they’re treated like yesterday’s news? Where’s the reverence? the pause? Where’s the chance to just… be nostalgic?

Instead of letting those stories live in our hearts, they’re being filtered, dramatized, stretched, and resold, not to reconnect with our childhoods, but to monetize our memories.

Every week, another “classic” song or movie  is butchered, overproduced, stripped of its soul, and thrown back at us in the form of meaningless beats.

You don’t feel anything, lyrics have no weight, dialogues have no personality. It feels transactional. Like it was made to fill their CVs, not to entertain and live in our mind for decades. 

Remember what it felt like to watch Hermoine correct Ron that- “it’s LeviOsa and not levioSA, or how each one of us cried when we saw Tony Stark die in end game or Snape in Deathly Hallows? How playing that one song on loop in your room made everything feel better. That nostalgia is what’s missing now.

We, the viewers, the listeners- we feel betrayed when the characters we adored… the songs we cherished…aspired to be and were so dear to us, are now reduced to bland, shiny shells.

You just scroll past. Because who wants to listen to noise dressed up as nostalgia?

Let things age. Let them breathe.

Because the magic of a classic lies not in how it’s remade but in how it’s remembered.

But here’s the daunting truth:

We’re not running out of stories. We’re just running out of patience. No one wants to take the risk to build something original anymore.

Because originality takes the strength to accept failure and face risks. It takes silence. It takes effort. And we live in a culture that rewards none of those.

We’re addicted to speed, algorithms, virality, and sequels. A remake shouldn’t feel like a memory with a price tag.

Art shouldn’t be stripped for parts and sold back to us with better lighting and less meaning. Originality didn’t die, it just stopped being profitable.

It is just hiding in the deep, dark well of doubt, fear of loss and flop. Hiding in the kid writing fanfiction no one will ever read. Maybe it’s in the dusty sketchbook under someone’s bed or it’s in the awkward, raw, unfinished note you’ve been too scared to share.

This isn’t just a rant session about the entertainment industry recycling our favorites ( okay maybe a little bit), but it’s really about something deeper, about how we keep hiding from our originality. How we bury the weird, brilliant ideas just because they weren’t born in a boardroom but were made in the bathroom, while zoning out during lecture, or in the middle of a breakdown. 

Why don’t we try to stop being so afraid of failure? Let things flop and let them be awkward, imperfect, even misunderstood. Allow art to be strange and stubborn and quiet if it needs to be. Keep it raw, honest and completely new, even if no one claps for it right away.

Because that’s where originality survives- not in what’s safe or viral, but in what’s real.

And if we lose that… we’re not just losing stories. We’re losing the parts of ourselves that once believed there was something beautiful in trying. The versions of us that didn’t care if it was perfect, as long as it was true.

Maybe what we need isn’t another reboot. Maybe we just need to remember what it felt like to make something simply because it mattered.

That’s the kind of art that stays. That’s the kind of memory that doesn’t need 4K or filters. It just needs to be left alone- to age, to breathe, to mean something.