Yesterday I watched a video on philosophy with the provocative title 'Life is Not a hero's Journey.' Expecting some kind of scathing critique of Joseph Campbell, I was pleasantly surprised to find a broad examination of the role of storytelling in society.
The film did a good job of highlighting the pitfalls of attempts to fictionalize our lives, mostly by asking questions. One of the main pitfall identified seemed to be the power of stories to create unrealistic expectations about how life should unfold. Another was that by structuring our thinking about reality according to Campbell's formula, only a preferred segment of society could achieve hero-ness, while the rest of us were merely extras in their stories. The third major pitfall identified by the film was the idea that the fictionalization of our lives made us easy to control by corporate forces attempting to sell us stuff we don't need by harnessing our desires to be viewed as adventurous. I found this last argument weak.
One area where this film shined was its attention to the history of fictional heroes over time. In the ancient world, heroes were impersonal creatures, often descended from the gods. Their purpose was narrowly defined to the destruction of monsters. Over time, heroes became more and more individualized, and their purposes began including personal transformation alongside fighting evil. This progression roughly follows Ronfeldt's societal evolution framework, which I thought was interesting.
Personally, I believe that the world is made of stories; that the stories we tell ourselves and each other determine our experiences to such a great extent that our stories are indistinguishable from reality. From this perspective, it doesn't really make sense to wonder whether or not we should be fictionalizing our lives. Our lives are naturally fictionalized by virtue of our existence within social contexts. So the critical question isn't if we want our lives to be stories, but rather what role we want to play in creating and retelling these stories that we're living.
Of course, we can't control what other people say about us, and the stories they tell about us inevitable conflict with our perspectives on occasion. Everyone handles such conflicts differently. In my own life, if I find someone telling a story about me that seems poorly aligned with my own story as I understand it, I usually try to politely correct the misconception. If that doesn't work, I begin regarding their opinion as unimportant and think less of them as a person.
This has to do with the concept of becoming new. Old, internalized stories can sometimes become barriers to overcome when parts of us are becoming new. I've had a lot of practice giving myself permission to be new. But the people around me have sometimes been attached to their old stories about me, and withheld this permission as a result.
This became pronounced in moments of major transition in my life. When I quit drinking, my partying friends didn't understand. When I got sick, even those closest to me had a hard time accepting the new me. And when I learned to manage my illness effectively, some of those who had only known me during sickness seemed unwilling to accept me as a whole and competent human being.
These experiences have challenged me to always try to give others permission to be new themselves. The hard part is to do this without expectation or judgment. Life is Not a hero's Journey grappled extensively with the always-becoming nature of our stories. But it barely touched on the idea of permission to be new, which seems like an underling issue to me.
As someone who lives much of my life online, I'm a strong proponent of fictionalizing life for social consumption. The social media machine has many drawbacks, but it does make it possible for people to exercise more control over their own stories. How we ultimately relate with that is up to us. But overall, I think it's a good thing.
(Feature image from Pixabay.)
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