One of the things that studying history does if give you a profound respect for contingency. That is, just how malleable history can actually be - how many immediate and distant factors combine to produce particular outcomes, down to the smallest level. Think of all the stars that needed to align for this comment to happen - I needed to be bored at the exact right time at the end of my work day, you needed to have had a particular argument with your friend, we both needed to be users of this sub, the sub (and Reddit) needs to have been founded, we need access to the internet (and the internet to have been invented). All that, and the answer I'm giving will likely not even be all that similar to the answer that may well be being written by another user right now.

The above just scratches the surface of the complex historical processes that could be said to have fed into this single, unimportant online interaction. One of the reasons historians continue to discuss and reassess crucial moments in history is because we're rarely talking in absolute terms (A led to B) - we're talking about the relative importance of a myriad of different factors. In this perspective, history repeating itself becomes impossible in any meaningful sense - while similar factors and patterns might reappear here and there, historical processes are too complex to be identical. This makes learning from the past a fraught business, and the search for direct parallels that can 'solve' current dilemmas highly problematic.

This then takes us to your point - because if we're not learning from the past, then why do we study history. Let's set aside any human reasons for a moment (I would personally argue that we all have an innate desire to know who we are and where we came from on some scale - individual, family, city, nation, religion, whatever - which means studying history of some sort). What practical value does history have in terms of making decisions today, if straightforward lessons can't be drawn?

Here, I'd turn your point on its head, because using the past to predict the future isn't just the preserve of historians, it's the basis of just about all predictions in all fields. Just about every form of qualitative or quantitative modelling is about taking data points generated in the past, and applying them to the future in the hope of working out what happens next (and what the best move now is). This applies not just to economics and finance, but also to politics - in fact, the whole point of fields like International Relations or Political Science is to build conceptual models from past data to explain why things happen now, and aid in making better decisions. In this kind of context, history in my view acts as a safety valve, a reminder that extrapolating from the past is complex, difficult and uncertain. Models, whether used for polling or banking, are fallible. We need to be reminded that our ability to understand past events and predict the future is limited, that our understanding of historical forces is incomplete, that decisions and ramifications are always uncertain.

An easy example here is the big political 'lesson' of the 1930s (my own field of study): that not standing up to threats just makes them worse in the long run, and you're best standing firm rather than appeasing your enemies. This argument has been used to justify aggressive foreign policy (and wars) ever since. The problem is... just twenty years early, before a similarly destructive war, the lesson was that war should be seen as a terrible last resort, that without careful diplomacy and willingness to compromise national interests, peace can collapse with frightening speed. Which lesson politicians take from the early twentieth century likely depends on their agenda and beliefs - the role of the historian, in my view, is to remind everyone that both 'lessons' do not provide a straightforward roadmap to navigating the future.

An interesting and murky topic.

First: The past and history are different things, depending on your definition. The past is, of course, a catch-all for almost everything we know. The human experience has three temporal modes.

The future, which is unknown.

The present, which is fleeting and extremely hard to pin down. This gets deeply into philosophy and physics, so let's just leave it at the headache-inducer that is: All your sensory inputs are outdated by the time they become feasibly available for your brain to process. Since even light has a travel time until it reaches your iris, and then a signal has to be transferred onwwards, undergoing various processes, it is safe to say, that you never actually "see the present", only images that are already in the past.

And the past, which is, after what we have just discussed, basically everything we actually can know.

So, from just this we can derive: We can only learn from the past, since everything else is unavailable to us.

And then there is history, which is also somewhat hard to pin down. The question of what belongs to "history" and what does not is a constant topic for historians, even if it is not debated directly all the time. Looking at the dictionary definition, history is the thing, the description of the thing and a whole bunch of other things. But Merriam-Webster included the word "significance", which is a good indicator. It means that someone (historians, journalists, archivists, the general public or specific interest groups at times) look for significance and create history - in part - by discarding that which is deemed insignificant and describing and interpreting the remainder.

As you might be aware of, this creates a wide range of significance that varies over time, as topics come into "fashion" or fall out of it. For example the academic study of history has been greatly enriched over the last decades - in my opinion - by creating more studies that focus on the history of "common people", asking about the lifes of "peasants" as a field of study in and of itself, rather than back-seating it as just something that might affect "traditional history" like wars, trade and big shifts in government or governance. All this creates history as a charmingly and frighteningly undefined and fluid thing, that is ever changing, even though the events of the past are by their very nature unchanging.

But why all the dry stuff? Basically just to say: there is no monolithic history that "tells it like it was", since that is an impossibility. Even the most carefully researched book will fall far short of LaPlace's all-knowing demon and be therefore lacking. In practice every historical study will have a question or questions and will strive to answer and select their sources (both primary and secondary) according to that. Since we cannot (mostly for practical and sometimes for ethical reasons) we cannot conduct controlled experiments, like physicists can, this will always mean discarding something that plausibly could have influenced what you are studying.

But how does this help us answer "does history repeat itself?". It helps us give the highly unhelpful answer: "Yes, kind of. Maybe. No, definitely not." Let's go through them

"No, definitely not": No situation from the past will ever repeat itself exactly. If you "zoom in" far enough, there will always be differences. For example: You might have two famine events in the same country without major political changes in-between. But by definition the experience of the first famine could have an impact on how the second one is handled. And since we cannot isolate that factor (that would require us to recreate the second famine at least twice, once with the preceeding first famine and once without that), we have to assume that it is a factor and therefore not a repeat. Of course, you can think up innumerable differences that might have influenced something for every given event.

"Yes, kind of.": But we can widen our scope and stop looking at the small details. We can make a longitudinal study looking and famines in mostly rural pre-industrial societies and look for commonalities, strategies that prevented large-scale loss of life, factors that influenced severity and many other things. It's always a bit murky, but good interpretative work can yield interesting results here. But you cannot get rid of the problem that essentially you are comparing apples and oranges. Or, in an absolute best case scenario, Granny Smith to Braeburn.

And finally "maybe". Maybe history does repeat to such a degree, if looked at with the right scope, that we can learn from it. Unsatifactory, but the best I can offer. But that "maybe" needs explaining. It is not a "maybe it is 100% true or 100% false". It is a caution against the extremes. I do not believe, even with all the doubts, that every single event in history is so unique that we cannot derive any wisdom from any of them. And I also do not believe that we can make any firm predictions based upon the study of history. If, for example, someone would point out patterns of rhetoric in a political figure I would hold both the following statements to be short-sighted and foolish: That because past figures employed similar rhetoric, the political figure must follow down the same path and establish a similar rule in future. The same would go for the dismissal of concerns by pointing out that the past is gone and the situation is totally different now and the similarity in rhetoric cannot be seen as a warning sign.

tl;dr A definite, firm maybe.

I want to take a slightly different tack from the other excellent comments here and focus on your comment:

if history does not repeat itself what would be the point in learning about it? For trivia’s sake?

I, personally, am fundamentally uncomfortable with the idea that history "needs" to justify itself with some kind of present utility, either financial or predictive. It's tempting, to be sure - being able to accurately predict what events are coming up would be basically a superpower in a capitalist society. Even more abstract relations of history to the present feel compelling, like we are at the culminating moment of the river of time, and seeing how people navigated their times ought to help us navigate times yet to come.

I, personally, have tried to do this! History lets us see alternatives to our present, to the way we do things, and see if, through the contingencies of their particular context, if a different culture offers a different way we could respond, and break down the troubling impulses of our time. I did this as a concluding thought to my MA thesis, and got some praise for it.

On a slightly different tack, it is certainly true the past echoes through to the present - people copied historical works, commented on them, shared them, and used (or still use) them for a million different purposes and goals. The whole subfield of "medievalism" looks at the reception of the medieval past in the modern period, from books to games to highfalutin nationalist discourses to Crusader memes. All of that is a use of history in the "present" that offers present utility.

However, history does not need to do this to be valid.

There are fascinating and wonderful histories done on things that, from the present day, are almost impressively useless! The question of whether, say, Haukr Erlendsson was interested in making a geographical miscellany while compiling the great Hauksbok manuscript in the early 14th century in Iceland is just not something that particularly matters in any present-focused view of history. And that's okay!

The study of history is something that has intrinsic merit, regardless of practicalities of finance.

In my view, the "goal" of history in the twenty-first century (but really much longer than that) is to more fully understand alternative ways of experiencing the human condition. Whether that is through moments of conflict, through queer and feminist histories, through decolonized perspectives, economics, sailing, environment, urban communities, rural communities, elite, non-elite, religious, guild, or even object-oriented perspectives, whether using sources from across an entire hemisphere or just one particular person, all history is about more fully accessing and more fully embracing the experience of being a sentient being on Earth. There is a joy in that which defies all attempts at justification.