I am a Masters student and have been struggling with motivation for some time.

Just a few days ago, I had what I thought was a really interesting idea. I performed a few small experiments and confirmed my hypothesis. Then when I started to look for existing work/theoretical foundations I found the exact same idea has been worked on and been put up on arxiv just a week ago.

This has happened to me multiple times and is a bit demoralizing and I just give up on the idea altogether thinking, what’s the point, even if i improve upon this idea, it’s not unique or novel in any way.

Has this happened to anyone else, do you work on the idea further? Or do you just give up and look for different ideas ?