What if the model we’ve been handed for a meaningful life is the thing breaking us?
That’s the question this book starts from.
Most of us have absorbed some version of the hero’s journey before we even knew what a journey was. Leave home. Find your destiny. Slay the dragon. Save the world. It’s the story underneath nearly every movie, business book, and leadership podcast we’ve ever consumed.
It promises that effort matters and that one person can change everything. It gives life direction and weight. Or at least it seems to.
The problem is that it was written about a fantasy world that doesn’t actually exist and never did. Try to live a hero’s journey in a polycrisis — a world of compounding ecological, political, economic, and psychological breakdowns where there is no single dragon and no clear destiny — and you end up exhausted, cynical, or convinced you’re not doing enough.
This is the structural shape of burnout among purpose-driven people. We are not tired because we worked too hard. We are tired because we are trying to be heroes in a world that does not work that way.
The Antihero’s Journey is the alternative. A way of contributing to a world in crisis that doesn’t require breaking yourself in the process. Smaller. Humbler. Less ambitious. And yet, what the world actually needs most: the pursuit of goodness over greatness.
The book is structured in ten chapters, each contrasting the hero’s and the antihero’s version of a single theme — the polycrisis, peace, presence, power, passion, prosperity, pain, purpose, practice, participation — with stories from my own life woven in.
A book written in public
I’m writing this book one chapter at a time, and posting excerpts here as I go.
If you want to follow along, subscribe to the newsletter and you’ll get each excerpt as it’s published. If you want to walk this same path with structure, support, and a small group of other purpose-driven people, Antihero Project is the course version of this work — the same ten parts, walked together over ten weeks.