On Brand & Optics, Performance & Story

 

From today's article in PJ Media, on "The Missing Hero's Journey: Why Our Culture Can’t Grow Up" by Jamie K. Wilson: 

"Jonathan Gottschall, in The Storytelling Animal, argues that humans are wired for story. Narrative isn’t a cultural ornament; it’s how the brain organizes reality. We turn chaos into sequence, conflict into purpose. Our minds insist on meaning and structure in a chaotic world. We need the Hero’s Journey because it mirrors the way consciousness matures.

This is why the postmodern dismissal of truth as illusion is so destructive. The mind cannot live without a through-line. When we deny objective meaning, the need doesn’t disappear; it mutates. Instead of seeking truth, people construct identities. They perform coherence. Story becomes branding, not belief.

Gottschall’s insight explains why even in a cynical age, the same mythic pattern keeps resurfacing in pop culture. We hunger for it. The Hero’s Journey is how the psyche metabolizes experience: departure, ordeal, and return. Strip away the ordeal, and the story — and the self — collapse into fragments.

Our young are not just starved for struggle; they are starved for truth. Illusion can flatter the ego, but it cannot forge the soul. A culture that replaces pilgrimage with performance leaves its children with only one possible quest: to be seen, not to become.

When truth is replaced by illusion, the journey becomes theater. The old pilgrimage, a test of endurance and faith, has become a performance for an audience. The self is no longer tempered; it is curated....

We have spent a generation trying to skip the middle, though the impulse began half a century ago when comfort and theory first conspired to make struggle seem unnecessary. It hasn’t worked. The result is visible everywhere: anxiety, fragility, disillusionment, and a desperate search for authenticity."