Antiheroes cultivate peace to manage the pervasive burnout of their careers and the exhaustion of living in polycrisis times. Doing so is critical to their basic well-being.
But survival is not the only reason.
They cultivate peace because they recognize a hard truth: we cannot create a peaceful world from a frantic, exhausted nervous system. Despite our best intentions, this relentless striving for greatness simply creates more striving in the world. Our burnout, however unintentionally, enables the burnout of everyone around us. It is yet another subtle message that doing what is good for the world requires pushing ourselves beyond what is good for us.
By practicing resilient equanimity, antiheroes live an entirely different paradigm. When so many others strive for the ever-elusive “world peace” through restless striving and inadequacy, antiheroes do so simply by sharing the true, embodied, deep peace they cultivate within themselves. They become a living, breathing example of what the next era — the antidote to the achievement society — can look like. They become an invitation for those around them to bring themselves back to healthy stability, if not outright abundant thriving.
Antiheroes claim their peace not just as an act of self-care, but as a deeply liberatory and revolutionary act. Their peace is not only a precondition for their change work; it itself becomes the change they offer the world. And it is far more potent and radical than anything the hero could ever muster.
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.
