(insert descriptor) Life

What is the ratio of original thought to copy cat thought? 1:10? 1:100? More?

On holiday (vacation - which word, which word?), in Florida, I noticed there was a new car sticker on the market with the phrase "Salt Life". Living in the cold, arctic north and surrounded on all sides by land and "fresh" water, this hasn't made it to us yet. Meanwhile in Florida... every 10th car or truck had a Salt Life sticker and a few were emblazoned with "Swamp Life". What was this all about? As I don't own a television, I wondered if there is a TV show that promotes the Salt Life - whatever that may be.

Upon returning home it continued to niggle at my mind. What is Salt Life? Google being close at hand, I ran a search and found: www.saltlife.com. Okay, pretty cool, they took their passion and made it into a business with clothing, stickers, cafes, skincare, surf gear, etc. Great! What about Swamp Life? A similar search turns up images, a youtube link to a reality TV show, and other random items but no website. Copy cat or original thought? Who came first. I could swear there was another "Life" out there in car stickers but can't recall what it was. "Forest Life" maybe? Google is silent on that one.

Where am I going with this? I'm wondering what is happening to original ideas as more and more people seem to be jumping on whichever band wagon happens to be ahead of the crowd at the moment. I believe it started with "Live Strong" and the yellow bracelets. Remember them - the rubberized bracelets imprinted with a phrase? Of course, at first, they were all yellow and they were all imprinted with "Live Strong". And then... EVERYONE started making, selling, wearing rubber bracelets. They came in every color, they came in several sizes. They were branded, they were used for fundraisers, memorials, etc. They were everywhere. In fact, walk into Cheesie's Restaurant in Chicago and ask for Matt. He's sure to be sporting at least 1, a hold over from his days of collecting rubber bracelets.

And then, they were gone. A fad. We've seen fads before. But I digress from my original thought (pun probably intended): Everything seems to have a copy cat these days. Look at how the "Car Family Stickers" took off. First they were stick figures, then they were: zombies, star wars, athletes, Disney, Indiana Jones, animals,... you get the idea. I'll concede that the person who conceived of the above 3 examples had an original thought but then, how many copy cats came out of it?

What got this all started? I read an article the other day about the newest Milk ad campaign. The supporters of drinking more milk, who brought us the original idea of "Got Milk?" (which was copied by everyone as well) are now jumping on the bandwagon of "(insert descriptor) Life" with "Milk Life"...

Where are we heading as a humanity if we are better at copying than creating new?