Being an NPC in Your Own Story

Living outside of your hero mythology… by force

Hi, I’m Max Murphy! A failed creative turned existential imbecile. These days, I write The Murphy Memos where we explore the absurdity of existence with crappy jokes.

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Finding your “why” is, perhaps, the most important thing you’ll ever do.

Today, we’ll be complaining about why that’s almost impossible under the current economic system.

A Life That Actually Has Meaning

Diving into Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death feels a bit like being told Santa isn’t real, but for adults. Suddenly, you’re aware that the ticking clock isn’t just background noise.

The TL;DR is that we humans are aware of our own inevitable deaths, and this awareness is actually kinda traumatic.

In order to cope, we construct hero mythologies - stories or narratives that give our pathetic lives meaning.

We spend our time in these symbolic worlds of invented meaning.

A world where it actually matters if you go to church, discover the cure to cancer, or get rich enough to frequent Epstein Island.

In the grand scheme of things, none of this really matters, but it’s fun to pretend that it does.

Hero myths are the comfy sneakers on the marathon of life, softening the steps toward the inevitable end.

But then, a rusty nail pierces your shoe: being condemned to waste most of your life doing something you don’t care about.

Purpose vs Profit

Today, the average person dedicates 40+ hours a week to something affectionately known as a “job” – a peculiar ritual where time seems to both stand still and sprint.

This strange labor relation where you sell the product of your labor for less than it’s actually worth, making someone else rich in the process.

You’re compelled to stay because if you stop, society lets you die in the streets like an animal.

We call this freedom.

Most of your life will be wasted at your job and there ain’t shit you can do about it. If you’re old enough to be selling yourself, then you know that jobs fucking suck.

Yes, all of them.

Jobs suck for many reasons, but I think a big one is that they don’t have any meaning - there’s no room for a hero mythology.

Finding meaning in today’s world is like trying to find that other sock after laundry day. You know it should be there, but somehow it ended up in a parallel universe where socks and dreams go to die.

The company you sell yourself to has a mission statement, a code of ethics, and all these fancy walls of text about how they’re making the world a better place.

It’s a landfill of lies.

If companies were honest, their mission statements would read more like a pirate’s love letter to treasure.

The end result?

Anyone who works for a living is denied the opportunity to live their own hero mythology.

A Flower in the Crack of the Sidewalk

How do you define a hero?

Do you think a hero is the average worker who drags themselves to the circus of tears that is their job, half-asses it every day, and lives most of their life in quiet desperation, yearning for there to be something more than whatever the fuck this is?

If not, then you’re living outside your hero myth. You’ve been reduced to an NPC in your own story.

Imagine being an aspiring YouTuber. You need to sell yourself at your day job so you can pay the bills, leaving you with little to no room to do the thing you actually care about.

It’s like being a flower growing in the cracks on the sidewalk.

All you can do is watch other people live your hero myth, knowing you’ll never be able to fulfill your own definition of a hero. They’re making millions and signing book deals, and all you get is angry comments telling you to kill yourself.

And maybe you should.

You have a hero mythology to deny your death, but if you can’t exist inside it, what’s the point of delaying the inevitable?