This hero’s journey has become a cultural phenomenon — a well-trodden staple of Western discourse, a template for superhero movies, a reference point for countless coaching programs, self-help books, and marketing frameworks. It has provided real insight and value to countless people.
And yet, the framework has real limitations and blind spots.
Several scholars have argued that Campbell built his monomyth by selecting stories that fit his template and quietly setting aside the ones that didn’t. The universality of the hero’s journey is partly an artifact of how it was constructed. Many of the world’s stories — particularly those from non-Western, collectivist cultures — don’t follow the pattern at all. They center communities rather than individuals, cycles rather than linear victories, relationships rather than singular quests.
The hero’s journey, it turns out, is not as universal as we imagine. It is a Western, individualist story dressed up as one. It is, in its own way, another example of Western whitewashing of a rich, diverse tapestry of human storytelling.
Media scholar C.P. Nield has taken to calling this the “Hollywood McMyth” — a mass-produced narrative formula that flattens the complexity of human experience into a single, repeatable arc. The label stings a little. But it isn’t wrong.
That distinction matters — because when we use it as a template for our own lives, we are not drawing on the deep, innate wisdom of all humanity. We are inheriting one particular culture’s assumptions about what a meaningful life looks like: exceptional, solitary, triumphant. We are inheriting the achievement society dressed up as poetry and wisdom.
We are inheriting greatness as a pursuit — as if striving to be exceptional is the very core of what it means to be human. It’s not.
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.
