What happened was that enough people, after a thousand years of being told that the universe was incomprehensible to them, that truth was revealed, and that their individual lives were secondary to the divine, began to insist otherwise. They started reading, writing, and they started to see that their mind could understand the world.

It wasn’t a minor adjustment. It was the most radical revolution in history, and its implications took centuries to fully unfold.

If the human mind can apprehend reality, if reason is a reliable tool — then you don’t really need a priest to reveal truth to you. You don’t need a king to organise your existence. You don’t need a pope to mediate between you and the world.

If the mind is an individual's primary tool for survival, it cannot function under coercion. You cannot force someone to genuinely think or to make moral choices at gunpoint. Therefore, for a rational being to live as a rational being, they require a sphere of autonomy—freedom from initiated violence. That sphere of autonomy is what we call "rights".

It’s the one thing that Immanuel Kant and Ayn Rand actually agree on, so you know there’s something to it. You need rights. You need liberty. You need a political system that treats the individual as sovereign.

For roughly two hundred years, this idea — the sovereign individual, equipped with reason, entitled to liberty — was the animating premise of Western civilisation. It produced science, capitalism, constitutional government, the abolition of slavery, the expansion of rights, and the longest sustained increase in human flourishing in the history of the species. Its crown jewel was the American constitution. It was incomplete and unevenly applied. It was, in many ways, a promissory note that took generations to begin honouring. But the premise was clear: your life is yours.

Kant began the downfall — or rather, Kant cracked open the door through which others would walk. His argument was subtle but enormously influential: the mind does not passively receive reality. It structures reality. What you perceive is not the world as it is but the world as your cognitive machinery constructs it. The thing-in-itself is forever inaccessible. Basically, Plato’s cave, but make it harder to read.

That sounds innocent enough, and in Kant’s hands it was. But what if different minds — or different groups, or different cultures, or different positions in a hierarchy — see reality differently? Then there is no single truth. There is no objective reality. There are only perspectives, and which one wins is determined not by reason but by power.

Foucault. Derrida. Marcuse. The critical theorists. Their project — and it was a project, deliberate and systematic — was the dismantling of the Enlightenment premise. Reason is not a tool of knowledge, they argued. It is a tool of power. Truth is not discovered. It is constructed by those with the authority to enforce their construction. The individual mind is not sovereign. It is a product of discourse, of power structures, of the group it belongs to. Your “knowledge” is just your group’s perspective dressed up in the costume of objectivity.

The implications were totalising. If reason can’t access truth, then the individual has no ground to stand on. If knowledge is a function of group position, then individual judgment is an illusion. If truth is power, then argument is pointless — the only thing that matters is who controls the institutions that get to define what counts as true.

These ideas flooded Western universities beginning in the 1970s. By the 1990s they were in the water. By the 2010s they had produced a generation — then two generations — trained in a philosophical framework that did something very specific to their narrative identity: it removed them from the driver’s seat.

The postmodern professor occupied the same structural position as the medieval priest. Both said the same thing: you cannot figure this out yourself. You need us. I don’t mean that any of these students could explain Kant, or Marcuse, or Plato for that matter. Very often, they have no idea whose ideas they’ve absorbed.

Without much of a struggle, the individual had been philosophically dismantled. And the people walking out of these institutions carried that inside them like a fracture.

What happens when you de-moralise a generation?

The philosophy didn't travel as philosophy. It traveled as a feeling. You don't need to have read Foucault to have absorbed his conclusion. A generation raised in institutions saturated with these ideas didn't emerge as postmodern theorists — they emerged with a background hum of illegitimacy. If your perception is shaped by your position, if institutions are seats of power, not values, if your reason is just violence in disguise — then trusting yourself becomes an act of bad faith. The psychological result is not just skepticism. It's vulnerability. A person who has been quietly trained to distrust their own mind is extraordinarily open to anyone offering a ready-made story about who they are and what they owe.

The psychological literature is precise about this. When the coherent self-story breaks — when agency collapses and a person loses the sense of being an author shaping their own plot — the result is a predictable hunger for a story to inhabit. A collective narrative with clear heroes and clear villains, a grand drama that absorbs the fragmented self, and a martyr or saint — someone to carry the burden of meaning on your behalf.

Wokeism was that story.

It had everything. A cosmic drama: structural injustice permeating everyday life. A priesthood of academics and activists who could tell you where you stood in the moral hierarchy. And a role for you, an easy way to matter: penance. Either way, you were absorbed into a story larger than yourself. This made you feel good.

And for a while, that did the job.

But here’s what the psychology also predicts: the penance was never going to be enough.

Because the hunger that drove people to wokeism was not political. It was existential. It was the hunger of the nihilist self for a story — for meaning — that would fill the void. The movement could not fill the void for the simple fact that it was a placebo. An attempt to assert truth through power. The march ends. The black square falls further down the instagram feed. Human nature kicks back in. And nothing had changed.

Tyler Cowen predicted in 2022 that wokeism had peaked, and he was right. DEI retreated. Universities got cautious. Donald Trump won the election. But Cowen returned this year with an ominous addendum: the energy hadn’t dissipated. It had mutated. The unreasonable side of wokeism — the appetite for power — had remained but the mask had slipped.

John Aziz, writing in Quillette last week, gave it a name. He calls it destructivism: the conviction that the most necessary political act is no longer reform, redistribution, or even the policing of language — but demolition. The pure desire to tear down systems deemed oppressive, with no programme for what replaces them. Take the billionaires’ money, not to fund something, but because they have it. Tear down Israel, not to build Palestine, but because Israel is a structure and structures are oppression. Abolish, dismantle, defund — the verbs of a movement that has lost interest in the pretence of pronouns. Aziz describes the symptom precisely.

What he doesn’t explain — what symptom-level analysis can’t explain — is why the energy went here and nowhere else. The answer, I think, is that it it was there to begin with. The point was always penance, and destruction is the ultimate sacrifice.

The philosophical premises — the denial of objective truth, the assignment of worth to group membership, the elevation of sacrifice over creation — my truth, my voice — were always going to resolve here, because destruction was always the point. It's what unites the omnicause: the left's rotating portfolio of grievances, from environmentalism to woke to free Palestine. Nuclear power and two-state solutions are an inconvenience. The destruction is the point.

So here’s what the psychology predicts.

The hunger that produced wokeism, and that is now producing destructivism, does not dissipate when you feed it destruction either. Destruction delivers the sense of mattering the way a drug delivers relief: with an escalating dose.

This means the targets must grow. A philosophy built on the denial of individual achievement will inevitably expand its definition of what counts as oppressive — because any visible achievement implies an individual who acted and who shaped the world according to their own values.

This is exactly what we are told we cannot do. Achievement is proof that agency works. Agency working is an existential threat to nihilism. So achievement itself must become the villain. In practice, this means attacking the capacity for production itself. Not just billionaires but wealth creation. Not just inequality but growth.

This isn’t theoretical. The Routledge Handbook on Degrowth was published last year — not by a fringe press, but by one of the world’s largest academic publishers, with fifty-five contributors across thirty-five chapters. Its title is not subtle: “Degrowth Has Come of Age”. A survey of the movement’s own members, published in Energy Research & Social Science, found overwhelming consensus that “profit-making is a form of violence” and that redistribution must come through struggle, not reform.

The tenth International Degrowth Conference took place last year. The eleventh opens this week in Krakow. These are not marginal gatherings. They are the institutional expression of a philosophy arriving at its logical conclusion. This is envy. And the students marching to tax the trillionaires are not marching for anything. Ask them what they’d build with the money. The question doesn’t occur to them.

The targets will also turn inward. A movement built on collective identity cannot tolerate individual distinction, because distinction implies agency, and agency is the heresy. Any member who stands out — too competent, too articulate, too visibly someone — becomes a threat to the collective premise.

Last year, the progressive organising group Our Revolution surveyed its members and found that ninety percent wanted Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to step aside — not a Republican, their own leader. Seventy percent wanted Hakeem Jeffries gone. A twenty-seven-year-old Democratic Socialist filed to primary Jeffries for his Brooklyn seat, backed by a faction that considers the Democratic leadership insufficiently committed to the cause. Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez distanced herself from the challenge — which tells you something about where the movement’s purity threshold now sits when AOC is the moderate.

And here is the twist: the right is running the same programme. The right is reactive, and always has been, and in fighting the left has accepted the same philosophical frame.

Elon Musk said DOGE needed to “delete entire agencies”. Not reform, destruction. “If we don’t remove the roots of the weed, it’s easy for the weed to grow back.” Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025, told his staff: “We’re going to let DOGE break things, and we’ll pick up the pieces later.”

There is a word for this, and the word is not polarisation. Polarisation implies two poles and a recoverable centre. Bloomberg liberalism is no longer the geometric mean.

The word is anomie.

The shape we prefer that plot to take — departure, ordeal, return — is what Joseph Campbell called the monomyth and what most people recognise instinctively as the hero’s journey.

This is a theory I wrote about previously, but like any good theory, it should move beyond the ink on a page and make predictions about the world. If the hero’s journey is the natural shape of a meaningful life, then the absence of that scaffolding should produce specific, predictable effects.

An obvious one, that I discuss in the essay, is that people with a weak personal narrative should become psychologically hungry for one. They should externalise the hero and go searching for him. They should drift toward strongmen, cults, activist ideologies, conspiracy theories and redemptive religions — because they offer a pre-built story to inhabit.

Call it second-handedness: meaning by proxy.

Here, I examine 5 more predictions, and the literature that has been testing them for decades.

Prediction 1: Narrative identity coherence should predict psychological wellbeing — and its absence should predict distress.

Dan McAdams, the psychologist most responsible for formalising “narrative identity” as a research construct, defines it as the internalised, evolving life story a person uses to make sense of who they are, and it is closely tied to the subjective experience of happiness and meaning (McAdams & McLean, 2013).

The empirical record here is solid. Narrative identity has been shown to have incremental validity in predicting mental health outcomes: a stronger relationship with wellbeing than other common predictors like gender, personality traits, or income (Adler et al., 2016). A longitudinal study of adolescents found that causal coherence in life stories predicted higher wellbeing one year later, suggesting a potentially causal role for narrative coherence in life satisfaction over time (Waters & Fivush, 2015).

The specific content of those narratives matters too, and it matters in a way that speaks directly to the hero’s journey and Campbell’s monomyth. A 9-year longitudinal study tracking 157 adults found that themes of agency and communion in narrative identity were significantly and uniquely associated with wellbeing and depression across time, over and above the effects of personality traits (Lind et al., 2024). Agency (the sense of being a protagonist who acts on the world rather than being acted upon) isn’t just a narrative flourish. It’s a mental health predictor.

And narratives characterised by redemption — where suffering is transformed into growth — are associated with lower depression and higher purpose, while contamination sequences, where good things curdle into bad, predict the reverse. Narrating coherent, agentic, and emotionally resolved narratives is positively associated with lower depression, lower anxiety, higher measures of meaning and purpose in life, and the capacity to forgive (Adler, 2012; Adler et al., 2016).

In other words, the first prediction holds almost exactly. People who can narrate their lives as a coherent story, especially as one featuring themselves as an agent who transforms through challenge, are measurably better off. People who can’t are measurably worse.

This already suggests a second prediction.

Prediction 2: The hero’s journey specifically — not just any narrative — should resonate as a meaning-making structure.

This is where a remarkable 2023 study by Rogers and colleagues, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, becomes central. Across eight studies, the researchers found a positive relationship between viewing one’s life through the Hero’s Journey framework and experiencing meaning in life. They developed a “restorying” intervention that guided people to see their lives as a Hero’s Journey, and this intervention causally increased meaning in life by prompting people to reflect on important elements of their lives and connect them into a coherent, compelling narrative (Rogers et al., 2023).

The word causally iskey. This wasn’t just a correlation between heroic self-perception and happiness. The intervention — essentially asking people to identify their call to adventure, their trials, their transformation — not only influenced how people saw their past and present but also affected their outlook on personal challenges and their resilience in facing them. The effect was consistently observed across various demographics, suggesting something more universal than cultural preference (Rogers et al., 2023).

This is the empirical vindication of the campfire intuition: the hero’s journey isn’t just a story template. It’s a psychological technology. When you frame your own suffering as an ordeal en route to transformation, the suffering becomes bearable and the self becomes coherent. You are the protagonist. This matters.

Prediction 3: Trauma should fragment narrative identity — and that fragmentation should create vulnerability.

If coherent self-narrative is protective, then anything that shatters it should be dangerous. Trauma, almost by definition, is the thing that shatters it.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman’s “shattered assumptions” theory argues precisely this. Experiencing traumatic events changes how victims view themselves and the world, specifically by disrupting three fundamental assumptions: the benevolence of the world, the meaningfulness of the world, and one’s own self-worth (Janoff-Bulman, 1992). When individuals experience a traumatic event that challenges their worldview and cannot be integrated with previously-held beliefs, their feelings of security, identity, and personal future are significantly undermined, and their inner world becomes disintegrated (Janoff-Bulman, 1992).

The narrative dimension of this is well-documented. Cognitive models of PTSD posit that onset is due to an inability to integrate new and traumatic experiential information with prior autobiographical memory, resulting in a disruption to one’s overall life narrative or beliefs about oneself (Ehlers & Clark, 2000; Brewin et al., 1996). Some research suggests that trauma memories are fragmented and incomplete immediately after a traumatic event (Brewin, 2025), and while many people gradually reconstruct coherence, those who can’t are the ones who develop chronic symptoms.

Trauma, in other words, is a narrative catastrophe. It breaks the plot. The self loses its throughline — its sense of being a character in a story that makes sense. And in that broken state, something else happens: the locus of control shifts outward.

Research involving maltreated children found that abused children showed primarily external locus of control and disorganised attachment patterns compared to controls (Craparo et al., 2016). A meta-analysis of 25 studies found that individuals exposed to childhood trauma reported a more external locus of control — a systematic tendency to attribute outcomes to forces outside the self rather than to one’s own agency (Bloomfield et al., 2021).

This is the mechanism. Trauma doesn’t just hurt — it de-protagonises you. It teaches you, at the level of deep assumption, that you are not the author of your own story. You are a character in someone else’s.

Prediction 4: People with fragmented narratives and external locus of control should be drawn to authoritarian movements, cults, and strongmen.

If trauma and narrative collapse produce people who have lost their sense of protagonism, those people should be disproportionately attracted to movements that offer a pre-built narrative — one that dissolves the broken individual self into a collective story with clear heroes, villains, and purpose.

Eric Hoffer saw this in 1951. He argued that prospective fanatics experience personal frustration so intense that their strongest desire is to lose their individuality altogether by surrendering to something greater than themselves. Mass movements exploit this frustration by offering true believers an escape from personal responsibility. The revulsion from an unwanted self produces both a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one’s individual distinctness in a compact collective whole (Hoffer, 1951).

Hoffer’s language maps almost perfectly onto the narrative framework: the “unwanted self” is the self whose story has collapsed. The mass movement offers a replacement story — grander, simpler, and crucially, one in which you don’t have to be the protagonist. Someone else carries that burden. Your job is to follow.

Erich Fromm arrived at the same conclusion through a different route. In Escape from Freedom, he argued that when the burden of freedom becomes too heavy — when people feel isolated, powerless, and adrift — they reach for psychological strategies that relieve anxiety at the cost of individuality. The first escape is authoritarianism — the attempt to give up one’s individuality and become part of a collective system that will dictate choices (Fromm, 1941).

The contemporary empirical evidence supports this. A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology provided the first causal evidence linking perceived societal breakdown — anomie — to support for authoritarianism, through a sequential process: anomie leads to feelings of political powerlessness, which creates political uncertainty, which increases the appeal of authoritarian rule (Neerdaels et al., 2025).

A representative probability-based study of 2,522 participants during the COVID-19 pandemic found that external locus of control, mediated by right-wing authoritarianism and conspiracy mentality, predicted xenophobia and anti-Semitism. The researchers concluded that social crises make people particularly vulnerable to regaining control via conspiracy theories and authoritarianism (Schuler et al., 2025).

Here’s the kicker: Fromm’s “escape” is not a passive surrender; it is often highly active, aggressive, and disguised as moral righteousness. This is where contemporary psychological research bridges the gap between individual narrative collapse and political extremism through what is known as the “Dark Ego Vehicle” principle (Bertrams & Krispenz, 2024).

When an individual’s personal life story is fragmented, they suffer a severe deficit in subjective meaning and self-worth. If they cannot build an internal narrative of agency, they look for an external “vehicle” to manufacture it for them. Radical social movements, dogmatic internet ideologies, and polarised political activism are perfectly tailored for this. They allow a person to hitch their fragile, unwanted self to a grand collective story. Suddenly, without having to undergo any genuine personal transformation or face their own internal ordeals, they are handed a pre-packaged heroic identity: the enlightened activist, the defender of the faith, or the the revolutionary.

Crucially, the literature shows that this narrative substitution attracts specific personality profiles. Individuals possessing Dark Triad traits—subclinical narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy—are disproportionately drawn to these ideological arenas (Rogoza et al., 2022; Zacher, 2024). For a pathological narcissist with a broken or unstable personal history, a highly polarised movement functions as a dual-purpose survival strategy:

1. The Shield: It projects an illusion of profound altruism and virtue signaling, protecting them from facing their own internal narrative emptiness (Krispenz & Bertrams, 2025).

2. The Sword: It provides a socially sanctioned outlet for aggression. Because the external narrative comes pre-equipped with a clear, absolute villain, it legitimises hostile behavior, political intolerance, and even support for political violence under the guise of fighting for a noble cause (Bélanger et al., 2023; Pavlović & Wertag, 2021).

This is the tragedy of narrative second-handedness. The individual who has lost the plot of their own life does not just become a passive follower; they are highly vulnerable to becoming an aggressive fanatic. They weaponise the collective story to fill their own psychological void, mistaking the cheap thrill of ideological combat for the hard-won transformation of a true hero’s journey.

Prediction 5: Creative agency should be protective — the protagonist who is busy writing their own story doesn’t need someone else’s.

Hoffer made one more observation that deserves attention: creative people — those who experience creative flow — aren’t usually attracted to mass movements. Creativity provides inner joy that acts as an antidote to the frustrations that lead people toward collective surrender. He noted that the slipping author, artist, or scientist — slipping because of a drying-up of the creative flow within — drifts sooner or later into the camps of ardent patriots, race mongers, and champions of holy causes (Hoffer, 1951).

This maps directly onto the theory. Creative work is, almost by definition, first-person protagonism — you are making something, shaping reality, authoring a small plot with your own hands. It is the opposite of second-handedness. When it dries up, the narrative vacuum opens, and the hunger for a story returns.

Pull the threads together and the picture is this:

Human beings construct identity through narrative — specifically, through stories in which they are the protagonist who faces challenges and is transformed by them.

This psychology is the primary. As humans invented fire ad began telling stories around it, the stories that emerged are those that resonated with our own identity: the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Odyssey and the Iliad are secondary.

When a narrative is coherent and agentic, wellbeing follows. When trauma shatters it — breaking the assumptive world, fragmenting autobiographical memory, shifting the locus of control outward — the result is a person who has lost the plot of their own life. That person is psychologically hungry, not for information or even for comfort, but for a story to inhabit.

What fills the vacuum isn’t random. It’s consistently characterised by the same features: a grand narrative with clear heroes and villains, a collective identity that dissolves the broken individual self, an external authority who carries the burden of protagonism, and the promise of meaning through submission rather than through struggle. Whether the vehicle is a cathedral, a rally, a cult compound, or an internet ideology, the architecture is the same. You get the emotional payload of the hero’s journey — the oceanic feeling, the sense of participating in something vast — without having to do the work.

The theory doesn’t claim that culture or collective identity are inherently pathological — only that the substitution of external narrative for internal narrative is a specific and predictable response to narrative collapse, and that this substitution, while it relieves the immediate pain of meaninglessness, comes at a cost: the surrender of agency, the foreclosure of the self, and a vulnerability to manipulation by anyone offering a sufficiently compelling story.

The prescription, if there is one, is not to avoid grand stories but to write them. It is not to avoid risks and challenges but to take them, and find meaning in them. The Rogers et al. restorying research suggests this isn’t just inspirational advice — it’s a measurable intervention. When people are guided to see their own lives through the hero’s journey lens, they report more meaning, more resilience, and a greater capacity to reappraise their problems as challenges rather than verdicts.

References

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Adler, J. M., Lodi-Smith, J., Philippe, F. L., & Houle, I. (2016). The incremental validity of narrative identity in predicting well-being: A review of the field and recommendations for the future. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 20(2), 142–175. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868315585068

Bélanger, J. J., et al. (2023). Radicalization to violence: Experimental and prospective evidence that dark personality traits and perceived group deprivation predict support for political violence. Aggressive Behavior, 49(6), 596–614. https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.22100

Bertrams, A., & Krispenz, A. (2024). Dark ego vehicle: Narcissism as a predictor of anti-sexual assault activism. Current Psychology, 43, 2556–2567. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04591-4

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Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Pantheon Books.

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It’s not that I got one suspicious comment. It’s that I’ve seen enough of them that the default flipped. I used to assume human. Now I assume nothing. And that’s a strange place to be.

That specific numbness is new. It arrived quietly, like most lasting change does.

So I went looking for more evidence.

Ben Moran gave me some. In early 2023 he posted a piece of commissioned artwork to Reddit. He’d spent over a hundred hours on it. The community took one look and banned him for posting AI art.

He was outraged and appealed the decision. He submitted his portfolio. He showed his working, in the way you’re apparently now required to do — proof of process, proof of labour. The moderators reviewed the evidence and upheld the ban. Their reasoning was that even if the work was human-made, it was so obviously AI-prompted in appearance that it didn’t matter.

Right.

The verdict survived the evidence. The accusation had become unfalsifiable — not because the proof was insufficient, but because the category of looking AI had been quietly untethered from the question of being AI. A new crime had been invented, and it was the crime of polish. Of smoothness. Of work that didn’t contain enough visible suffering to be believed.

Katerina Ladon, a professional illustrator, had a similar experience the following year when D&D Beyond posted her hand-painted artwork online. The replies came quickly. AI. Obviously AI. What a surprise. She hadn’t used AI. She’d bled for the deadline, as she put it — and to prove it, she posted her sketches. Her drafts. The whole unglamorous archaeology of how the thing got made.

She called it what it was: a witch hunt. And she was right, with the specific historical accuracy that phrase deserves. The witch trial’s particular cruelty was never really about witches. It was about the impossibility of proving a negative. You cannot demonstrate the absence of something someone has decided to believe is present. The accused could confess or they could deny; either way the accusation held.

Moran and Ladon won their individual cases, in the end.

But something had already happened that winning didn’t fix. The burden of proof, de facto if not de jure, had moved. It now lived with the artist, permanently, to demonstrate that they existed. And the tools available for that demonstration — the sketches, the process videos, the time-lapses — are themselves replicable now, or will be soon.

This is the thing the slop discourse misses, in its focus on contamination and detection and building better filters. The witch hunt isn’t a bug. It’s what happens when the epistemology breaks down at the root.

Because the detectors are worse than useless. Not by accident. In principle. One analysis ran books written five and ten years before the current AI boom through multiple AI detection tools. One returned a verdict of fifteen percent AI-generated. Another said eighty-eight percent. Same book. A writer whose style involved deliberate, Gertrude Stein-ish repetition was flagged as a machine. A rose is a rose is a rose is a robot. What these tools actually measure, it turns out, isn’t origin. It’s smoothness. Structure. Command. The more deliberately someone writes, the more likely a black-box algorithm decides they didn’t write it at all.

We built machines that learned to write like humans. Then we built machines to catch them. And those machines, it turns out, aren’t very good. The competence is the tell.

So the witch hunt catches the witch and then some. And in the back of our minds, we’re left with doubt. We look for proof of life.

The numbness didn’t start with ChatGPT.

There was a period when Facebook was just the Wall. Your friends wrote on it. You wrote on theirs.

Then the feed arrived. The one that knew better than you did what you wanted to see. The one that had done the maths. And so the content became optimised. Increasingly fine-grained, fine-tuned, increasingly homogenous—until the internet itself became a thick paste.

Screen-time, they call it. The thing that was meant to bring us together turned into slop. But, as I ponder my notification and the numbness, I think the maths is breaking.

Now that generative AI has met the recommender engine, the result is something like a perfect ouroboros of meaninglessness. AI content, optimised for algorithmic distribution, untethered from reality, served by an algorithm to automated accounts generating engagement signals that feed back into the algorithm itself, which serves more of it. A perpetual slop machine. Content that exists to be content, noticed by nothing that can actually notice.

So I get a notification, and I feel numb. The engagement has collapsed, predictably.

We are at peak social media, and it is oddly befitting that it should all end with a feed of AI-generated absurdity. The digital town square we have built for the last two decades has morphed into a circus.

I started keeping a paper notebook again, which I hadn’t done since university. Not for any reason I could articulate at first — just that I wanted to make something that was uniquely mine. Full of crossings-out. Ugly handwriting. A drawing of a dog that doesn’t look like a dog.

I know people who’ve gone back to film photography or vinyl mixing. Not just for the aesthetic — but for the friction. The way you only get 36 shots. The way you can feel the record spin. The way it is unforgiving. The mistake is there now, permanent, eternal.

For twenty years, a very particular kind of perfection has been the dominant mode of public life. The LinkedIn voice, the influencer, the corporate-branded email. Success became a playbook, and as our world became digitised, we learned to present ourselves with the smoothness of machines.

None of this started with AI. AI just learned to do it better, faster, and cheaper than any human ever could, which is when the whole edifice became impossible to defend. When you can generate a thousand LinkedIn posts of identical sincerity in the time it takes to make a coffee, that sincerity is revealed to have been performance all along. When you can solve LeetCode problems with the throughput of a GPU, entire identities are exposed as a farce.

The Renaissance wasn’t a reaction to the printing press. That’s a category error people make. It was a reaction to a thousand years of being told that human experience was secondary to divine perfection. That your body was a problem. That your feelings were noise. That your specific, mortal, contradictory life was something to be transcended rather than examined. The church had produced centuries of art in which the human figure existed only as a vessel for the sacred — stylised, flattened, reaching upward, deliberately drained of the specific.

And at some point, enough people were sufficiently exhausted by the denial of their own humanity that they started painting muscles and giving their characters names. Started writing about grief and desire and political ambition as if these were worthy of serious attention. Started insisting that the human scale was not a lesser register but the whole point.

The printing press didn’t cause that. It just gave the exhaustion scale. Suddenly you could discover that everyone else felt it too. The hunger had been there for generations. The technology made it impossible to contain.

We have been, for two decades, inside our own version of that bargain. Not divine perfection — corporate perfection. Algorithmic perfection. The perfection of the optimised, the smoothed, the A/B tested, the engagement-maxxed. A vast, sustained aesthetic of performed depth that was always, underneath, asking you to feel less so that you would click more. To receive rather than make.

And just as the medieval church produced increasingly elaborate machinery to sustain a cosmology people were quietly losing faith in, the platforms have spent the last few years producing increasingly elaborate machinery to sustain an attention economy that people are quietly walking away from.

AI didn’t create the exhaustion. It just made it undeniable. Now I receive a notification and I begin scanning for typos. For proof of life.

I think about this a lot.

Take some facts, string them together in a certain way, and suddenly our heart sings.

A hero leaves home, faces trials, transforms, returns. We’ve heard it a thousand times, and we’ll hear it a thousand more, and every single time—if it’s done right—something in us sits up and listens.

I don’t think it’s just taste. It’s not even cultural.

You can watch a five-year-old, seeing Star Wars for the first time. Luke looking out at the twin suns, yearning for something more. The kid goes still. Not bored-still: transfixed. Something in that image reaches past their conscious mind and grabs something deeper. They don’t know why the desert orphan gazing at the horizon makes their chest tight, why it makes them want to pick up a lightsaber. It just does.

Or, take the trial lawyer who knows that facts are secondary. A jury, a mountain of evidence, and none of it matters as much as the story. It’s the meme: “Ladies and gentlemen, this isn’t about contract law—this is about a father who made a promise.” Now the Jury leans forward. The moment you give them a hero to root for, a villain to hate, a wrong that needs righting—the facts arrange themselves around the narrative like iron filings around a magnet.

This is what we are. Story-making machines.

One afternoon in July, I’m standing in Notre-Dame and a woman in front of me is crying.

Not polite tourist tears. Real crying. Shoulders shaking, face in her hands, the kind of weeping that looks like relief. Above her, light streams through rose windows older than my bloodline. The vaulted ceiling disappears into shadow and centuries of candle smoke have darkened the stone.

She kneels.

And you can see it happen. The way her face changes. Not peaceful exactly—transported. Like she’s not in Paris anymore. She’s somewhere else. Somewhere vast. Her small life with its small problems—the flight she almost missed, maybe the argument with her sister—all of it dissolves. She’s part of something bigger now. The cosmic drama. The eternal story of fall and redemption. Her tears aren’t just hers anymore. They’re every sinner’s tears, every soul reaching for grace.

And I’m watching it happen.

She’s experiencing what Freud called the oceanic feeling—that sense of boundary dissolution where you stop being a separate self and merge into something infinite. What Jung called the numinous. The sacred. She’s touching the archetypal plane, where the particular blurs into the eternal. Individuals become heroes and villains. The holiday in Paris becomes The Journey. Dark nights turn to brighter dawns.

And here’s what I keep thinking about, standing there in the tourist shuffle:

She kneels.

Not metaphorically. Literally on her knees. And somehow that posture—that submission—is the price of admission to the transcendent. The cathedral is designed for it, and not just the hassocks. The architecture literally forces your eyes upward, makes you feel small, pulls your gaze toward something higher. The stained glass, the soaring arches, the altar raised above the congregation—it’s all saying the same thing: you are not the hero of this story.

The other guy is. We call him Christ. Your job is gratitude.

And I think: What an odd thing. What happens to the child within her that once wanted to wield the lightsaber and slay the dragon? Doesn’t she want to be the one climbing Golgotha? What is the price of this spiritual switcheroo? She gets that oceanic feeling, sure. But she gets it as a spectator. As a drug.

This is, I think, the trick Christianity perfected.

It gave people the hero’s journey—the cosmic battle, the transformation, the redemption—the same tightness in the chest the child felt—and then cast them as extras. Christ climbs the mountain. Christ faces the trials. Christ transforms and returns. You? You get to watch. You get to kneel in gratitude. You get the oceanic feeling without the ordeal.

And it works because the feeling is the same. The architecture of the experience—separation, initiation, return—it’s all there. It’s just that someone else does the living while you do the weeping.

There’s a photograph I think about a lot.

Tuol Sleng, Phnom Penh. Security Prison 21. Before they killed you—and they killed almost everyone—they took your picture. Thousands of them. Face after face after face, staring into the camera with expressions you can’t quite parse. Not terror exactly. Something else.

I saw them not long after Paris. Room after room of faces pinned to walls. A mother holding her infant. A man in glasses who could’ve been a teacher. Teenagers. Children. Each one photographed with this bureaucratic precision, like they were filing paperwork, not documenting murder.

And that’s when I learned about the loudspeaker.

In the camps—the Killing Fields—there was a speaker system. All day, every day, crackling through the rice paddies: “To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss.” Over and over.

That struck me. Because the Khmer Rouge, I think, understood the same thing the cathedral builders understood: if you want people to dissolve themselves, you don’t just tell them to. You create the conditions for it. You build the structure—physical, sonic, psychological—that makes the dissolution feel like transcendence. You make them want to kneel.

The woman in Notre-Dame kneels and touches the infinite. The revolutionary kneels and... what? Touches the Revolution? The People? The glorious future that never comes? They get that same transported feeling—the boundaries dissolving, the small self, the argument with their sister perhaps—disappearing into something vast. Your job is to be grateful.

This is what happens when you perfect the trick. When you industrialise the oceanic, without transcendence, without God, without even the promise of meaning. You’re still an extra in someone else’s story. But now the story is about how your life is just administrative consideration. There’s no resurrection waiting on the other side. Just the collective.

The Nazis had rallies for it—the torches, the flags, Nuremberg at night. The Soviets had May Day parades. If you can make people feel like they’re part of The Story—the eternal struggle, the historical inevitability, the purification—they’ll forgive you for erasing them. They’ll march to their own obliteration weeping with gratitude because you made them feel like it meant something.

The difference between Notre-Dame and Tuol Sleng is just this: who built the church.

So why do we like some stories?

I think it’s because we’re wired for them.

That five-year-old watching Luke stare at the twin suns isn’t learning to admire heroes. He’s learning what shape his life could take. He doesn’t want a red lightsaber or, god forbid, a blaster. He wants the green one. He wants to be the hero.

We don’t just like stories. We are stories. It’s how we make meaning, how we decide what matters. It’s how we know who the villain is, who our friends are, whether we’re living in a tragedy or a comedy. It’s how we feel what is good or bad.

And I think when the story hits right—when you’re standing at the summit you climbed and look back—no matter what that mountain is—you feel it. That oceanic feeling. The same one as the woman in Notre Dame. But not because someone told you that you matter. Because you became something. At that moment, the particular dissolves into the archetypal. Your summit becomes The Summit. Your struggle becomes the journey.

I think that’s why we like stories. We didn’t cross oceans by kneeling, and we didn’t write symphonies by following a guide. Nature didn’t teach us to do those things. It didn’t teach us how to hunt either. It only gave us the hunger.

But in the absence of great stories to live, that hunger doesn’t disappear. We reach for the stories of others, stories of salvation and redemption. It finds other ways to feed.

She’s bronze. Slouched. Her arms hang at her sides like she’s waiting for a bus, or perhaps in line at the DMV. Her face carries the specific blankness of someone watching an Instagram reel. She isn’t noble. She isn’t interesting. She simply occupies space, which I suppose is the point.

A few hundred meters south stands another sculpture. You know the one. Torch. Crown. Tablet. That bearing — the kind that makes you stand up slightly straighter just looking at her. The Statue of Liberty is everything the first statue isn’t: upright, aspirational, moving toward something. One says follow me. The other says I’m fine, actually.

I think about this a lot. Maybe too much. But then I end up in a gallery somewhere and the thinking starts again.

What is art? What is it meant to do?

To hear the defenders of modern art tell it, the answer is: to subvert. It must challenge norms, break rules, and overturn bourgeois sensibilities. Art, they say, must transgress. And if it fails to offend someone, then it’s nothing but decoration.

This is allegedly what the slouching statue does. At least, that’s the sales pitch.

But it only works if you don’t look too closely. Because far from subversive, modern art is the reigning orthodoxy—the establishment it seeks to dismantle. Walk into any major gallery from Oslo to L.A. and you will not find rebellion. You will find sameness. The same shapeless installations, the same squiggles passed off as critique, the same tired sermon in a slightly different font. “Disruption” has become a bit of a bore. It’s in Time Square, with council approval. If this is rebellion, I’d hate to see resignation.

We are told, with earnest eyes and thick frames, that this art is inclusive. That it rejects the Eurocentric standards of form, proportion, and skill — those dusty relics of dead empires — in favour of “concept.” The banana taped to the wall, we are reminded, is not the point. The idea is. The thought. The critique. The message.

And so you begin — like any good citizen of the gallery — by asking the obvious: What is the message?

That’s when things get slippery.

Because there is no answer, only suggestion. The piece “explores.” It “interrogates.” It “responds to a discourse.” And if, in the course of your exploration, you find yourself underwhelmed — or worse, unmoved — the diagnosis is simple: you just don’t get it.

In this way, modern art does not persuade. Its defenders operate not as teachers but as gatekeepers, their power derived not from clarity but from opacity. They do not explain because explanation would kill the spell.

This is the most damning thing you can say about modern art, I think. The gravest of all its sins. It is unthinking. It does not awaken the intellect or stir the soul; it numbs both. It does not challenge you to look closer; it warns you not to look at all.

So you nod, you praise, you repeat the approved phrases — “subversive,” “important,” “a necessary commentary” — and in doing so, you demonstrate that you get it.

So I begin to hunger — not for subversion, not for “necessary commentary”… but for clarity. And believe it or not, there was a time, not so long ago, when the purpose of art was not to obscure but to reveal—to make plain, in form and shadow and skill. If you trace that hunger back far enough, you don’t arrive in a loft in soho, but in a marble courtyard in Athens.

If the Egyptians reduced man to a glyph, Greece exhumed him.

With the right set of eyes you can see where the statues stepped off their slabs. Muscles tensed. Backs twisted. Eyes turned toward action, toward consequence, toward life. Where Egypt carved icons of death, Greece sculpted individuals. Men mid-stride, women mid-dance, gods mid-battle — bodies frozen not in obedience but in motion. Art stopped whispering liturgies to the dead and began, at last, to speak to the living.

It’s difficult to overstate the radicalism of this shift. For the first time in history, art was not a memo to the afterlife, to an idea, but a mirror held up to man. And what it reflected was breathtaking: anatomy, emotion, effort, defiance. A belief — scandalous by ancient standards — that the human being was not merely a vessel of fate but a shaper of it.

My favourite is The Discobolus. The coiled athlete preparing to throw, every muscle honed and loaded like a poem in marble. Or the Winged Victory of Samothrace, her robes billowing as if striding through wind and time. These were not decorations as much as they were invocations. Art became, in the Greek world, an argument for man. A three-dimensional man. An agent of thought and force. It was the birth of the hero — not as the pet of the gods, but as their rival.

Greek artists, I think, had struck something deeper than technique: they had trespassed upon the sacred. Not the sacred in the ecclesiastical sense, but in the psychological sense—in the mythic sense, in that primal chamber of the human soul. What Jung would later call archetypes. What Campbell called the monomyth. What every child with a cape understands before they learn to read, and every adult forgets.

These were not mere statues. They were ancestral memory made manifest.

The Greeks did not sculpt because they needed to fill space or because they wanted to impress the gods — though they did plenty of that. They sculpted because they intuited, with terrifying precision, that man becomes what he beholds. That if you show a people only their fears, their wounds, and their indignities, they will begin to wear them like identity. But if you show them strength, courage, beauty — the perfected form — they will at least know what the art of struggle looks like, even if they never reach the summit.

You need only stand before a kouros or a Hellenistic Apollo to feel it — that ache in the sternum, that surge of something you might call reverence or envy or ancestral memory—a connection to the great tale of history. You do not admire the statue because it’s beautiful. You admire it because it knows you. Because it speaks the same psychic dialect you were born with, the same longing for form and purpose that animated the Iliad and still animates every decent story we bother to tell.

What I keep coming back to, walking past that bronze woman with her limp arms and her permanent shrug, is the question of what it’s for.

Picasso said, “Art is the lie that enables us to see the truth”, and I think he’s right. This is what art is meant to do: to inspire.

Not in a grandiose sense. Just: what does art think we’re capable of? What does it expect of us?

The old answer was: quite a lot, potentially. More than you’re managing right now. Here, look at this — look at what a human body can be, what a human will can accomplish, and feel accordingly ashamed or inspired or both.

The newer answer, delivered through installation art and prestige television and slouching bronze: you’re fine. You don’t have to try. Presence is enough. The aspiration itself was always the problem.

I don’t buy it. And I don’t think most people buy it either, not really — which is why they still line up to stand in front of the Greeks, still feel something move in them when they do.