"THE DESERT GROWS"*.

While making plans, we are casting into future events what we judge to be 'lessons from the past'. Well, as it is well known  humanity would not have thrived as a species without our ability to choose paths based on mistakes, hits, fears and joys already experienced.
At a first glance, at least, that advice conveyed to us by assumed wiser people according to whom "anyone who does not pay attention to past events is doomed to repeat them" seems a good guidance to live by.

Let us reflect a little upon this point: 'doomed' does not sound like an appropriate word there, because it gives the impression of applying itself only to negative experiences. We may try to improve the phrase perhaps so: 'anyone who does not pay attention to past events is destined to repeat them'.
Has this word change been enough to turn that advice always useful?

Anyway, let us look closely at which assumptions must be fulfilled for it to be a helpful guide:

1º) We must be sure no error has been made in the interpretation of the circumstances in which those recorded 

past events have happened. Only this way will it be possible 

to correlate causes and effects, in order to possibly infer any mechanisms that will allow the recognition and reproduction of similar situations, in order to avoid non-desired events and favor the good ones.

2º) In our world, the future must repeat the past, i.e., there's no place  in it for true unexpected changes. Such an assumption rules out aleatory events, at least concerning human relations. The best metaphysical option that fits this is determinism.

3º) There's no place too to actually new, creative answers to those past challenges to which the presumed best solutions would already have been found.

Friedrich Nietzsche points out to a grave effect brought about by our strong tendency to always face present challenges with past solutions. 

Given the increasing number of memory records throughout the generations, something potentialized by the invention of writing, thereafter by the press and by the never ending  so many technological novelties, human beings have got all bound to gradually losing in their freedom to make authentically own decisions, becoming unable to live the present with true spontaneity, increasingly muzzled  by the errors and / or even by the right hits of those who preceded them. In the name of concrete, supposedly more secure existences, our lives become alien to ourselves, every day emptier of personal meaning, determined by choices taken as 'the best possible', but about which we don't know who first made them nor which concrete circumstances were surrounding them. 

Even when the advantage of following past advices may seem very obvious, the growing alienation of our decisions evidences the emptying of the sense of human living.

* "The desert grows: woe to him who hides deserts!" ['Die Wüste wächst'] is an aphorism of F. Nietzsche, that points to the crescent emptiness of meaning in our existences, an inexorable fate of contemporary mankind. It is in the fourth part of 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra'.