Our striving to be the hero so often consumes, exhausts, and demoralizes us. And the heroic view of social change is wholly inadequate for confronting the complexity and vastness of the polycrisis.
So rather than try to be the hero, we and our world are much better served by us becoming antiheroes.
But the antiheroes our world needs most are not the gritty, morally ambiguous protagonists — Loki, The Punisher, the reluctant hero who stumbles into saving the day. They are not those who turn their backs on a world in need. They are not the subject of a Taylor Swift song.
No. For our purposes, an antihero is something different entirely. Something new.
An antihero is someone — anyone — who challenges the constant societal pressure to achieve something extraordinary, be great, or save the world. They ground themselves in sustained peace rather than a quest; resist the urge to place themselves at the center of the story; and confront and transform the pain within rather than the mythic foe out in the world.
An antihero is someone who knows that the enemy of the good is not evil. It is not a more sanitized “badness” or even perfection. The greatest enemy of the good is greatness itself. It is the desperate need to constantly validate ourselves, to win approval by standing out from the rest. It is the delusion that what the world needs more than anything is for us as individuals to win glory and acclaim.
Simply put, an antihero leads themselves on a different kind of journey. Not from the ordinary world to the extraordinary. From the overwhelm of a world in crisis and the burnout of trying to be its hero — to the simple, basic goodness that can actually transform it.
This is an excerpt from my upcoming book The Antihero’s Journey: From Burnout to Real Contribution in Polycrisis Times. To read other excerpts, go here.
