What Is The Modern Version Of A Mythical Adventure?
Very few inventions have survived the test of time and transcended epochs as well as the art of storytelling. The most powerful stories became myths and legends, transporting crucial ideas and cultural learnings through generations. They became an important part of societies and a foundation upon which civilizations were built. These myths gave us blueprints on how to live, by pointing at a hero. The heroes in these stories often went on perilous journeys to get what they wanted; They fought monsters, solved impossible riddles, and crossed magical realms full of demons and mischievous gods who often wouldn’t let the hero’s pass without completing an impossible task or solving a riddle or two. These heroes started as ordinary men, who evolved into extraordinary individuals, transformed through the adventures they went on. These mythologies were so foundational to human societies that the mechanism of a hero’s adventurous journey and subsequent transformation were deeply ingrained into the mind of the populace through religious texts, festivals, and rituals. Azhagar festival and Soorasamharam are examples of hero myths being celebrated as festivals and ritualistically performed every year in front of thousands of people.
Maybe We’re Put On This Earth To Go On Adventures
Adventure seems to be a consistent theme in all of these stories and if mythologies are supposed to be life lessons then is the central task of one’s life to go on an adventure? Even though the idea of getting on a ship, sword in hand, to go fight monsters sounds cool as hell, we can’t do that for the simple fact that we have to show up at work tomorrow. The best we can do is fool ourselves into thinking that a bike trip to Ladakh is an adventure that nobody else thought of. So how do you go on an adventure in the modern world? For that, we need to dissect the ritualistic aspect of a mythological adventure and fit it into a modern, applicable format. But…
What Is An Adventure?
Scholars like Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell have interpreted the hero’s journey as a message that implores us to go on an inward, psychospiritual journey. But we could still gain some more insight through a literal interpretation of the basic framework of mythologies. The basic idea of adventure has been consistent throughout all the mythologies; it involves the hero travelling from his place of comfort into foreign lands, often in search of glory. But if you could translate the idea of adventure into a busy, modern, work-tied world, how would it look? What constitutes a hero-forging adventure in the modern world?
Redefining Adventure
To go on a truly transformational journey one must first recognize how their place of comfort also acts as a restraint that prevents them from achieving greater glory and subsequently conjure up enough courage to leave it. As the people living in the most peaceful time in history, it seems that our era might make it tough for us to even start the journey, because our palace of comfort, the modern society itself, is the most comfortable humans have ever been in history.
Our modern global civilization is something the planet has never seen before. Through technological advancements and capitalistic networks we have designed a world where modes of existence, in terms of careers, are predetermined so we don’t have to sit and think about how to construct our lives, all you need to do is to go through the educational systems and get a job to the best of your abilities. This system exists so that the speed of economic and technological progress is unhampered. Individuals could simply focus on survival and define themselves by the jobs they do and the titles they hold instead of going through so much trouble to discover who they are, on a psychological level. But the truly adventurous are the ones who refuse to take the safest path, Like Hercules who when given a choice between a life of pleasure and a life of struggle and glory ultimately chose a life of hardship and became the hero we know today. In a world that numbs the soul through safe options that collapse your infinite potential into one single career identity, an act of courage might simply be to say no to the safe options offered by society and explore the vastness of your potential.
The Spirit of Adventure
Centuries of civilizational progress, of trial and error, have led us to a point in time where we now have an abundance of everything, an abundance of things, and even of identities. You no longer have to choose between being a peasant or a warrior. So Instead of going on a journey to explore untamed landscapes, we could explore the raw ocean of possible identities. We live in an exciting time of cyberization where there are more than one ways to be, our lives are already split between two identities, one that exists in the real world and the other in the digital world. Information and global exposure are readily available to all through the internet; anyone could technically educate themselves to be sufficiently skilled in anything they want. But it requires tremendous amounts of time and effort to invest, time that the safe options of the society will not let you have. Only a very few would dare to explore the infinite possible identities to forge a suitable one for themselves and for that you need, more than courage and will, an adventurous spirit.
