I actually enjoyed reading Maps of Meaning by Jordan Peterson. I understand that in the last few years he’s really taken off the human mask and showed a really

I actually enjoyed reading Maps of Meaning by Jordan Peterson. I understand that in the last few years he’s really taken off the human mask and showed a really unflattering side of himself. One of the points I took away from the book is that the hero’s journey story form is inevitable because it maps to how we make sense of the world. We are constantly trying as animals to make sense of a chaotic environment. His version of the ur-story is that we have a territory of understanding, and the journey is how to go out of this safe place of the know , make some meaning out of it (make it useful, understand it, conquer it) and “bring it home”. At the end we are better for having incorporated more of the world into ourselves. They way humans uniquely do this is through story, but even at an autonomic level our bodies maintain homeostasis through the same process. Fundamentally what it means to navigate an environment—something all mobile creatures do— is to create these “maps of meaning” and then use the maps that we have internalized to move through the world. This skill is what makes is able to learn, to be flexible, and to be resilient. Stories aren’t very interesting to people if the characters in them don’t at least have a chance to learn something. Stories where everything always goes right and there are no problems at all mean that the characters in them never leave the territory of the known. But there are so many ways to inject meaning in a story that don’t map directly to the heroes journey. There can be stories where the hero never learns or conquers anything at all, but the viewer is better for having experienced it. That’s where I think the heroes journey theory breaks down.