A Hero's Journey

The Hero’s Journey is probably the most overused template in writing. For some reason it just works on me. Probably one reason I still love shonen anime or any other movies is that they just make use of the Hero’s Journey template a lot.

The hero’s journey is nothing special. The hero lives their ordinary life like every other day. But one fine day, something extraordinary happens. Then he faces a bunch of challenges, almost fails. But it all comes together one way or another.

I was talking to Sabhyata, * ahem linking your google scholar profile for the flex * a while back. I think it was last week. On how life felt like when we were kids, and how lately life has been just a flat line where almost every weekday just feels the same.

I think I’ve later gone into the rabbit hole of just working on weekdays. There’s nothing else happening. Especially because you’re working remotely, which does kinda open doors to a lot of things. But I’ve been rarely utilizing it for a while.

I remember Subin telling me, “Kiran, full time pani alla jeevitham.” Okay, ironic because I used to say the same thing to him around like a year or maybe two years before. I think this is a pointer that at least a few of the 90s kids just like me who are going into their late twenties have slowly accepted the fact that life, in fact, is just an act of increasing shareholder value. And at the some point we stopped having fun. We just focus on making money or like trying to survive, because that has been a challenge of its own.

This made life redundant. Like every single day has been the same. If you had an office you just wake up, go to the office, do things, get back home, try to get some sleep. And then you have the weekends. But everything else, every other day, just feels the same.

Talking to Ashika about this was an eye opener. Back in school, we used to bunk classes or not get much worried about attendance or things like that. Even though school or college was just the same redundant week, we were still having fun.

How frequently do you do that when you’re kind of like working? Like would you risk a Monday morning, or maybe a Sunday night, to just do things like you used to?

Probably not that much. I think that’s the problem. You’re not having enough fun. You’re not making enough memories while trying to survive the next day.

Work is rarely a fun place to be. You get to have less fun than what you used to have when you were kids in school or college. So time kind of flies, which kind of suffocates the hero. The hero just lives on a flat line at this point.

You know how those goofy main characters in anime or movies just do things for the plot?, for the sake of having fun. I think we should, or specifically I should, go back to those principles. Try to have fun while doing the boring task, just so that the hero feels a bit more alive. I think Himmel the Hero would do the same

This is an internal introspection that I’ve been kind of like doing lately so just FYI for the readers out there

But yeah, that’s the hero’s journey. He hasn’t found his supernatural trigger to go on an adventure. So the hero is trying to expand his surface area of luck so that he could just go on an adventure at some point. Sometime soon. You know, he’ll make it work. So not much of a worry.