In chapter 21 of How to Read Literature Like a Professor, there's a line that says "Shakespeare is very much a product of his time in suggesting that one's proximity to or distance from God is manifested in external signs."
What I want to focus on from this sentence is not about God. What's important right now is that even the Bard was influenced by his time period and enviroment.
The chapter also goes on to tell that Hemingway, Eliot, a bunch of other greats, were also influenced by the world around them.
That's not a bad thing, but it does help to screw a cap on possibilities.
That's why we study literature from its beginning: so we can be exposed to more than current events and best-sellers.
It's important that we figure out that theres more than meets our eye and hopefully, maybe, as creative thinkers, we might come up with something new.
You are correct. We are all products of our environment but that doesn't mean we are stuck there. We should look back and see where things started in order to be able to move ahead.