There’s this feeling in the air that’s hard to name, but you know it when you wake up to it. It’s like you’ve fallen out of the story. Every headline is a fragment. Politics are a shouting match. Tech is rewriting the rules before we even get our feet under us. AI learns faster than we do, trust in just about everything collapses in slow motion on the news ticker. And beneath all the noise, a quieter crisis: meaning itself has become slippery.
Sometimes I wake up and think, we’re living between stories. The old myths are in pieces. The new ones haven’t landed yet. What happens to a society that’s lost its myth?
Campbell and the Death of the Gods
Joseph Campbell tried to warn us. In The Power of Myth he called it the death of the gods—or maybe the masks just fell off. Our old stories, the ones that made life coherent, have grown hollow.
“We’re in a free fall into future,” Campbell said. Out of the religious, into the scientific. Out of the collective ritual, into the algorithmic scroll. Myth, he argued, was never about believing in talking snakes or burning bushes. It was psychological technology—a symbolic operating system, running quietly in the background, turning chaos into meaning.
Religion was the interface. Metaphor, not manual. It spoke in the language of image and symbol because literal truth was never the point. The point was coherence, belonging, guidance through change. When that evaporates, you get what we have now: a world that knows everything but understands nothing.
Myth and Modernity
But let’s not put this on religion. Campbell saw it coming: we’re not faithless because old myths failed, we simply broke the speed limit. Industrialization, globalization, and now AI, every new era inherits the pace of its machines. One hundred years ago, you talked with your neighbors about the world. Now, the world is a notification, and your neighbor is an avatar. Ritual requires time, myth integration. We’ve replaced initiations with onboarding, sacred stories with content feeds. When nothing is sacred, everything becomes a transaction.
The Arrival of AI: A New Mythic Force
And here comes AI, mythic in its own right. Omniscient, omnipresent, deeply inhuman. It predicts your next move, whispers back your words in perfect mimicry, never tired, never wrong—until it is, spectacularly. Prometheus, Babel, Frankenstein, the old stories recognized the danger of creation unmoored from myth. We’re playing god with silicon clay, but we left the myth out of the machine.
There’s psychological fallout here nobody in Silicon Valley wants to touch. AI isn’t just a labor-saving device; it’s a slow-motion existential detonation. It threatens work, value, how we relate, what it means to be needed at all. It erodes identity at the root. When the ground shakes, spreadsheets are useless—what we need are stories that can hold the weight.
The Call for New Mythology
Campbell wasn’t calling us back to stained glass and incense. He foresaw the need—and the inevitability—of new myth. Not something to believe in, something to inhabit.
“The mythology of this unified earth as of one harmonious being…”
Global, planetary, neither anti-tech nor anti-magic. A myth that can metabolize both quantum physics and the experience of awe. Something that puts us all in the story, not just a chosen few.
The Shape of New Myth
What might this myth look like? It won’t drop from the sky. It will rise from within—and it probably won’t look like religion at all. Psychedelics, Jungian therapy, storytelling circles, meditation, even AI itself—these are doorways, not destinations. The new myth is decentralized, experiential, lived. It teaches us to use AI as a mirror, not a master. It reminds us that the last real frontier isn’t virtual reality, it’s the wild unknown of our own inner cosmos.
The Role of Lifemap
This is why Lifemap exists. It isn’t a test or some growth hack. It’s a myth-making machine—a guided profile that places you at the center of your own legend. It’s a quest that puts you in touch with the hero that lies within, in a time when every signal is noise and direction feels extinct. The Hero’s Journey matters now, maybe more than ever. It’s a structure that holds, even when everything else comes loose. Belief system? No. Map? Yes. At Lifemap, you get the call to adventure—and, if you have the courage, you get to become your own mentor and earn the return.
The Need for Story
In the end, the soul needs story. You can’t outthink your way to meaning, you have to live it—stumble, re-write, make it true by making it real. The world doesn’t need more data sets. It needs more people willing to become inner heroes, to risk coherence, to ask what’s worth serving when the old maps have burned. Campbell wouldn’t fear AI. He’d turn to it, asking: What is this teaching us about ourselves?
Every age writes its own mythology. Ours is unwritten. So here’s the question:
What story are you living now—and who gets to hold the pen?
