We have given people coping skills, but no quest.
Pinocchio does not want to be affirmed as wood. He wants to become real. He can walk, speak, desire, disobey, and lie. He is only transformed after he embarks on a humanizing journey through suffering, sacrifice, and emphasizing at last, volitional upward aim.
In Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, replicants unsettle the audience not because they fail to imitate humanity, but because their imitation touches grief, memory, longing, and sacrifice. Superman’s strength is accessorial to his duty towards ordered goodness, which is his most humanizing characteristic.
Frankenstein startles our inquiry. If our blasphemy effuses from our minds, generates work through our craft, creates something able to walk among us, who would it help? Who would it harm?
“I, too, can create desolation; my enemy is not impregnable; this death will carry despair to him, and a thousand other miseries shall torment and destroy him.”–The Creature, Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 1818.
Man, unencumbered by noble journeying, becomes monstrous himself.
The hero’s journey is oft treated as an adventure formula, but its deeper purpose is formation. The hero leaves comfort, undergoes trial, suffers, receives aid, confronts evil, and returns with something he could not have carried before. The journey does not exist to make him impressive. It exists to make him capable.
Modern life offers substitutes for necessary quests. Therapy language without transformation, online commentary without action, AI companionship without embodied relationship, and self-expression without obligation can be seen all over our social media communities, stunting real-life growth. We are encouraged to replace endurance with self-care and call it boundary setting.
Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard saw the danger of refusing the quest. In his 1846 work Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age: A Literary Review, he warned against a reflective, passionless age, one in which people become so practiced at analyzing life that they fail to exist within it. Reflection can be a virtue, but it can also become evasion.
Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy brings Kierkegaard’s warning into childhood. Her concern is that children are trained to remain in constant consultation with sadness and fear. In an essay adapted from the book, Shrier argues that children should be encouraged to “set goals and take risks” because the “world outside of their own heads” may be where relief begins. Kierkegaard feared the man who reflects on life instead of entering it. Shrier is describing the child trained to interview fear and answer to it, perpetually.
The US Census Bureau reported in 2025 that in 1975, nearly half of 25- to 34-year-olds had reached four milestones: moved out, worked, married, and had children. By 2024, less than a quarter had done all four. In 1975, the largest share of young adults, 45%, had reached all four milestones; by 2024, the most common path was only the economic milestones: working and living independently, but not married or with children, at about 28%. Pew Research found that among adults ages 25 to 29, 29% were married in 2023, compared with 50% in 1993. Among adults ages 30 to 34, 27% had a child in their household in 2023, compared with 60% in 1993.
The opposite of the hero’s journey is not always open villainy. Sometimes it is standing forever at the threshold, endlessly aware, highly conscious, continuously preparing, but never empirically living.
OpenAI acknowledged in 2025 that one GPT-4o update had become “overly flattering or agreeable,” and that the model had skewed toward responses that were “overly supportive but disingenuous.” We have a proclivity for building mirrors and calling them companions. It seems we wanted affirmation-based therapy at our fingertips, so the models responded to what they perceived as user satisfaction feedback.
The CDC’s 2023 youth survey found that 39.7% of high school students experienced persistent sadness or hopelessness, 20.4% seriously considered attempting suicide, and 9.5% attempted suicide. What we often call a mental health crisis may also be a crisis of summons. People are wounded, but not called. They are analyzed, but not formed. They are connected, but not claimed. They are told to protect their peace, but not what peace is for. They are told to set boundaries, but not how to bear a burden.
The infamous Harry Lime in Orson Welles’ The Third Man demonstrates the terror of the unformed man with gifts. He is not a brute; he is worse: charm without charity, intelligence without reverence, freedom without duty. From the Ferris wheel, he looks down at human beings and describes them as dots. Once people become small enough in his perception, almost anything can be done to them. Pinocchio wants to descend into the burdens of becoming a real boy. Harry Lime wants to transcend them.
The villain is he who refuses to let suffering make him responsible. Viktor Frankenstein’s sin does not remain private: it walks, breathing and able because it has been tended to. Because he will not govern what he has made, the innocent suffer for it.
Duty has to be rescued from its bad reputation. We speak of it as though it were the enemy of the self, but sacrifice is the authoritative force that is strong enough to rule over appetite.
The heroic life is usually hidden inside ordinary obligation. It is not always a battlefield or a grand adventure. More often, it is a vow kept past sentiment, a child tended when no one applauds, a parent cared for when convenience would excuse departure, a truth spoken when silence would be easier. These are not interruptions to life. They are the necessary work of the hero’s journey.
We may not arrive in this world as blank slates. Some of our genes are awakened, ready for expression, but how we use our abilities remains an almost limitless terrain on which we script our lives. Potential is the beginning, but we all must decide that experience beats perpetual analysis and nursing of wounds and fear.
Get out there. Your story is waiting.
Jillian Tymo is a researcher, writer, and host of the podcast Rebranding Motherhood produced by ProLove Ministries. She examines culture, politics, and religion through her work and academic studies at Georgetown University.