1. The Intro: The Illusion of Poverty
The sensation of having no money—Money Dysmorphia—isn’t just a math problem. It’s the visceral feeling that what you spend today isn’t building an asset. It’s just burning away.
Last time, we watched the myth of meritocracy burn. Now, we dig into the deeper root cause of that collapse. It’s the narrative structure hijacking our brains: The Hero’s Journey. Coined by a mystic named Joseph Campbell, this narrative became famous when Hollywood baked it into the DNA of movies like Star Wars.
Let me give you the conclusion upfront. If the Hero’s Journey is the only narrative you know, you are guaranteed to suffer from Money Dysmorphia.
Why? Because the chance to become a hero relies entirely on external conditions you cannot control.
If mental gymnastics and a sudden “awakening” were enough to make you a hero and save the world, everyone would be doing it. The Hero’s Journey is a complete lie that fails to reflect reality. Yet, too many people clutch this narrative as their only map for life. And that guarantees you’ll feel poor. You’re bleeding money in irrelevant places, chasing an impossible dream.
Related Articles;
- Money Dysmorphia (Part 1): Working Hard to Stay Broke — The Death of Economic Leverage
- Money Dysmorphia (Part 2): The Collapse of Social Leverage — The Death of Individual Competence
2. Narrative is the Survival Manual of the Underdog
Michel de Certeau nailed it. A story, he said, is a subjective interpretation and a record of how we spend our time. Therefore, the ability to construct and decode stories is the ultimate survival skill for the common man. It makes sense. Anthropologically speaking, the guy who knew the most stories was the ‘shaman.’ Eliminating randomness and uncertainty—that is the core of mythological thinking.
Think about the spaces we inhabit: offices, factories, schools. Their rules of engagement are rigidly fixed by capital, science, and law. In these spaces, your specific context and individuality vanish. You get your paycheck only if you obey. But it doesn’t go as far as Foucault’s paranoid vision of total self-surveillance and punishment.
De Certeau was more interested in the ‘poaching’ acts of commoners who don’t own the space. He was annoyed by structuralists like Foucault and Bourdieu who castrated the imagination of the masses, treating them like puppets. I don’t entirely buy into his liberation theology or romanticization of the public, but his study on how people ‘bricolage’ their time is fascinating.
Think about it. Even straight-A students don’t just study at school. Living like a machine holds no meaning. So, they always find ways to goof off. It’s the same in the real world. The underdogs steal time to forge their own stories. They siphon off potatoes during breaks to brew vodka. They mentally edit YouTube Shorts while sitting in a boring lecture.
- Space (Capital, Science, Law): Flattens everything onto a 2D map. This compressed map has no time, no context. Everything exists as an abstracted symbol, operated by strict rules. (Synchronic)
- Time (Narrative, Story): Creates sequence and rhythm. “And then…”, “Suddenly…”
Stories have timing.
“That’s when he took a hard right.”
The decisive moment is captured. By hearing how David crushed Goliath, we download a tactic into our memory bank. When a similar situation hits, we pull out that tactic.
Narrative, therefore, is the survival skill and tactical manual of the underdog.
The tragedy? Modern man only knows one manual: Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. If you can never be the hero, how the hell are you supposed to survive? Without an arsenal of alternative narratives, you won’t know how to hustle or adapt when cornered. Everything in the world feels unstable. You end up wandering, begging for a messiah to hand you a narrative of salvation.
3. Social Leverage: The Collapse of the Hero’s Journey
What if the Hero’s Journey actually worked? Then your current expenses and pain are merely the ‘trials’ on your path to greatness. Soon, you’ll acquire a weapon, meet a mentor, smash the oppressive father figure, and save the village. You wouldn’t feel poor.
But what if it doesn’t work? Then your current suffering is entirely meaningless. You’re just bleeding cash with zero return.
(1) What Joseph Campbell Actually Sold
Mythologist Joseph Campbell analyzed the world’s myths. And he boldly declared:
Every story shares a single blueprint. The Hero’s Journey.
The structure is dead simple:
👉 Departure: The hero lives in a safe, ‘Ordinary World.’ One day, he receives a ‘Call to Adventure.’ Fearful, he initially refuses, but eventually leaves his comfort zone and crosses the boundary.
👉 Initiation: Outside the boundary lies the wild. The hero walks the ‘Road of Trials.’ He fights monsters (economic crisis, isolation, failure) and enters the inmost cave (inner terror). After this death-like agony, the hero awakens and grasps the ‘Elixir’ (reward).
👉 Return: The journey doesn’t end there. The hero must bring his newfound wisdom back to the ordinary world. He is no longer normal. He is the ‘Master of Two Worlds,’ sharing his wisdom to save his community.
Campbell framed myth as an archetype constantly churned out by the human unconscious. So, he argued that all religions (including Jesus Christ) and moralities follow this exact script:
Birth -> Descent into Darkness -> Death and Resurrection/Awakening -> Return and Salvation.
Therefore, he claimed that modern mental illness and alienation stem from the loss of these ‘rites of passage’ (rituals of perception shift). You need death to have a resurrection, but society has become too damn safe. Star Wars stole this structure. Christopher Vogler turned it into a screenwriting bible, skyrocketing its fame, and soon, every self-help book, startup pitch deck, and brand storytelling manual copied this exact template.
In my eyes? Campbell’s claim is an academically unverifiable circular logic. It’s a sloppy mashup of Freud and Jung’s collective unconscious, suddenly accelerating into a Puritan savior narrative. There is zero theoretical grounding. It’s just him saying,
“I looked at some myths, and trust me, it’s true.”
Consequently, its practical implications violently derail into ‘transcendental’ bullshit. Campbell famously said: “Follow your bliss.” This is a spiritual transcendence where the boundary between pain and pleasure vanishes.
Simply put: It’s a psychological high. How the hell do you actually reach this state? It’s hilarious if you read Campbell’s interview book with Bill Moyers (The Power of Myth). Moyers keeps pressing him:
“How do we reach transcendence? What exactly is this bliss?”
Campbell constantly dodges. He filibusters with random mythological trivia—the Garden of Eden, snakes, Oedipus. His answers are worse than a low-tier cult leader’s.
That’s exactly why orthodox academia, including Lévi-Strauss, ignored Campbell. Campbell’s story was nothing more than the Western myth of individualistic success, repackaged as cosmic truth. Pure American romanticism.
But the masses ate it up. Because they harbored a desperate desire to be heroes, they were mesmerized by Campbell’s narrative.
“If I just awaken, a mentor will magically appear from the outside world holding a magic elixir!”
LOL. Sure, in Hollywood movies, the timing clicks into place right on cue. Reality doesn’t work like that. You have to build a survival structure, endure, and forge your own meaning. But this narrative programs you to sit around waiting for luck and plot twists. Reality is agonizingly boring. No one knows when—or if—the answer will come. Yet, we still view reality through a Hollywood lens. And that is the fatal flaw.
(2) Problem 1: Campbell’s Mysticism Disguises Structural Flaws as Personal Sins
Let’s look closer at the poison in Campbell’s narrative. Campbell mashed up Carl Jung’s collective unconscious with Freudian theory. He claimed every myth in the world could be explained by the hero narrative. But this is pure circular logic. He inductively extracted a structure from specific cases, then shoved that same structure back onto those cases, declaring,
“See? The structure fits perfectly.”
Michel de Certeau saw this structuralist approach as a killer of life’s rich meaning. It suffocates the possibility of new, alternative meanings being born. You can extract a structure, sure, but you cannot claim it is the absolute “archetype.” If the archetype doesn’t fit reality, you must have the freedom to explore other narratives.
Here lies Campbell’s true toxicity. To elevate his a priori structure to the level of unquestionable dogma, he draped it in mysticism. Because mysticism cannot be verified, it is far more insidious than science, which at least fights with facts. (Science is boring. But it’s true. And it works.)
“Just wait, your spirituality will reveal itself soon!” or “You just haven’t awakened yet; your hero’s journey has already begun.”
These are the exact lines used by cult leaders.
Mysticism itself isn’t evil. If it makes you happy, fine. The problem is that Campbell desperately mixed his mysticism with phenomenology, ecology, Buddhism, and Daoism to manufacture authority. He even made the absurd claim that science itself is just another myth. He acted as if global intellectual discourse backed him up. His famous mantra, “Follow your bliss,” is, coldly speaking, just a spiritual ecstasy. A psychological high. Using that manufactured authority to prescribe how others should live their lives is frankly disgusting.
This attitude does absolutely nothing for your survival. Survival means analyzing the problem, finding efficient methods, and forging your own meaning in life. But what happens if the grand narrative—meet a mentor who turns your life around, awaken, defeat the devil, and save the world—never materializes?
Who takes responsibility for that misery and self-loathing?
(3) Problem 2: Freudian Prescriptions Reduce Systemic Violence to Individual Psychology
To Campbell, a hero is someone who breaks through their inner self to achieve self-perfection, then returns to save the community. To achieve this, the “rite of passage” is crucial. A rite of passage is the turning point where the relationship between the world and the individual flips. But Campbell emphasizes only one side of this coin: If I change my mind, the world changes.
This leads directly to Freud’s psychoanalytic prescription: you must be liberated from inner repression. Freudian psychoanalysis takes the oppression and frustration caused by social structures and reduces them to individual family dynamics and sexual symbols. Take a guy who is humiliated at work and financially unstable.
- The correct approach is to analyze this as a problem of labor market structures and job security.
- But Campbell interprets it like this:
“The repression formed in your relationship with your father is unresolved,” or
“Your unconscious fear of authority makes you project your father onto your boss.” - Suddenly, the root cause of a systemic socio-economic problem is shifted entirely to a childhood complex.
So, in Campbell’s hero narrative, overcoming worldly struggles is framed as a “ritual of overcoming the father” or a “rite of passage facing the inner shadow.” But reality is not a soft place that bends just because you had a psychological shift or a personal awakening. Campbell famously said,
“Luke Skywalker’s (the archetype of Oedipal patricide) most rational moment was when he found the inner resources within himself to handle his destiny.”
Let’s summarize this logic:
Fatalistic archetype premise → Dive into the inner self → Re-cognition through a rite of passage →
A mashup of Freud and Oedipus → Spiritual rebirth.
Why did Campbell mix these incompatible genealogies and drape them in mystic symbols?
In my view, he did it to turn his hero’s journey into an infallible panacea. By combining two works of fiction (psychoanalysis and Greek mythology) and claiming, “The cause of the problem is within you, and the solution is within you,” it becomes an irrefutable dogma.
Did Luke Skywalker awaken all by himself in his bedroom? Hell no. 🔥 Obi-Wan Kenobi, the magical external mentor, had to show up. R2-D2 had to deliver a hidden holographic message—a purely external event. Only then did his journey begin.
Campbell gaslights you into believing,
“The cause and the cure are both within you.”
But the actual trigger? The switch that starts it all? That has to be flipped by someone or something entirely on the outside—a mentor, a miracle, a sudden rite of passage. So what the hell are you supposed to do? Sit in your room, whip yourself with guilt, and just wait for a wizard to knock on your door?! 🤪🤪
Narrative structures do not have objective archetypes. I am pointing out that Campbell’s premise is rigged from the very first button. The world holds countless narratives and stories. Take a convenience store clerk. In Campbell’s narrative, he is enduring trials and will someday awaken as a hero. But that might not be the case at all.
👉 In reality, he sneaks expired bento boxes for lunch behind the boss’s back. He saves one for his friend.
👉 He curses and mocks the boss in secret.
De Certeau called this a tactic. The clerk is simply creating his own story to survive day by day. It’s a way of making meaning in time, even when the physical space has been stolen from him. It is not a hero’s narrative. It is a survival skill. How this narrative is formed depends entirely on the clerk’s mind and agency.
Campbell’s defenders argue that Hollywood simply corrupted his pure work into commercial heroic entertainment. But I don’t blame Hollywood. The core problem is that Campbell’s theory was already a dogma built on mysticism. Hollywood merely materialized his narrative into an event-driven plot, injected tension and resolution, and cast characters like the mentor, the ally, and the master.
Put this all together, and you realize something dark: if you deeply internalize the Hero’s Journey, the pain in your life will only multiply. Is there any way for an individual to know when “divinity” will arrive,
or when the rite of passage will open? When will “Dr. Freud” show up to dismantle my structure of repression? If you get used to this waiting and frustration, you lose the realistic sense that survival requires mastering tangible skills and building an eye for structural dynamics.
Merleau-Ponty and Zhuangzi taught that to recover agency, you must change the physical world your body inhabits, not just your mind. Instead of staring into your soul waiting to become a hero, go cook. Play basketball. Carve some wood. Change the hardware, not the software. Those who sit around waiting for an awakening only impoverish their own minds.
(4) Problem 3: Campbell Erases Alternative Narratives
There are many kinds of stories in the world.
- Why the monk drank sweet water from a human skull.
- How a random act of kindness to a swallow returns as a blessing.
- Tolstoy’s vision that the world is sustained by the quiet altruism of ordinary individuals, not a lone hero. These stories enrich our interpretation of life. They open paths where, even if you don’t become a hero, you can be a sage. Even if you don’t become rich, you can be a good neighbor.
But as Campbell’s hero narrative merged with the self-help industry and Hollywood, these alternative paths vanished. It accurately pierced the psychology of individuals desperate to be heroes, but it amplified their misery just as much. It left behind no narrative for those who fail to become heroes, breeding only the helplessness of watching others achieve greatness on a screen.
Campbell emphasizes the importance of “rites of passage” repeatedly.
“Traditional societies had rites of passage. They help you shed infantile unconsciousness and
become an adult. (…) Look at the Native Americans. They hunt, perform rituals, and are reborn. But modern America lacks this, so modern people remain in an infantile state. We desperately need rites of passage as mechanisms for psychological maturity.”
But a rite of passage isn’t some grandiose event. It is simply a shift in perception—seeing phenomenon A as B. However, Campbell understands it as a “Sudden Glory” striking like lightning from the outside.
Consequently, modern people who worship the Hero’s Journey treat rites of passage as literal events and anniversaries. A society where everyone believes they are the main character is a massive, lucrative market. Corporations gleefully step in to sell these “rites of passage.” Coming-of-age ceremonies are the prime example. Parents buy their adult kids cars or laptops. Lavish party videos flood social media. Backpacking trips across Europe. Those who can’t afford to consume these events brand themselves as immature, stunted beings.
“Why can’t I do that?”, “Why doesn’t my family have money?”
This agonizing pain is Money Dysmorphia. It is not a numbers problem. It is the visceral sensation of being evicted from the standard narrative. But you don’t have to be a “consumer of rites of passage” to become an adult. Zhuangzi said that the true adult who knows the Dao is the one who properly carves a chariot wheel. Managing an apple orchard or holding a knife in a commercial kitchen—these are also valid ways to become an adult. The adult is the one who controls the field as a producing agent, not a consuming livestock.
Campbell’s narrative refuses to acknowledge this. To the one who fails to become a hero, it offers only one cold answer:
“The flaw is within you. BUT wait for a wizard coming”
It is a structure engineered to brand you with a sense of ontological failure. We need a discourse that proves another path is possible—a narrative not for the consuming hero, but for the producing survivor. Campbell erased that language.
4. The Conclusion
Let’s summarize. The sensation of having no money is a problem of social leverage. It is a question of which narrative you use to read your life. You need the internal conviction that the pain and costs you endure today are building your future assets.
But Campbell’s Hero’s Journey fails to provide that conviction. It only hands a sense of failure and self-loathing to the individual who cannot become a hero. Why? Because Campbell fused a single narrative with mysticism to forge a cosmic truth. According to his narrative, you are either a hero, or a hero-in-waiting. There is no other path. Every other possibility for life is blocked. Failure is no longer a structural problem; it is reduced to your personal lack of awakening.
Those waiting for an awakening obsess over external validation—likes and view counts. Those who fail to pay for the standard rites of passage brand themselves as immature. That is how you become poor. Your narrative goes bankrupt long before your bank account does.
De Certeau was different. He said that even if you don’t own the space, the time is yours. Siphoning potatoes to brew vodka, mentally outlining YouTube Shorts during a lecture. That is a tactic. That is survival. That is a narrative. You don’t need to be a hero. You just need to forge meaning right where you stand.
Watch movies. Read novels and fairy tales. Stop listening to worn-out love songs. Billy Joel sang about displacement. Nas sang about survival. You must hunt for alternative narratives without drowning in the toxic swamp of heroism. Begin the bricolage. The meaning of life is something you build yourself.
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