Hero's Journey vs. Anti-Hero's Journey
- Ben Askins
- Apr 18
- 7 min read
Ah yes, the Hero’s Journey—Joseph Campbell’s beloved carousel of spiritual puberty—and its degenerate twin, the Anti-Hero’s Journey—Doc Askins’ deranged demolition derby for souls tired of pretending they have one.
Let’s set these two clowns side by side like dueling banjos on the deck of the Titanic and let the irony flow like cheap communion "wine" at a megachurch picnic.
🦸♂️ The Hero’s Journey
"Become Somebody."
🪦 The Anti-Hero’s Journey
"Realize You're Nobody."
1. The Call to Adventure
Hero: Hears the call and bravely accepts the mission.
“The world needs me.”
Anti-Hero: Hears the call, hangs up, blocks the number, and throws the phone into a volcano.
“There is no world, dipshit.”
2. Crossing the Threshold
Hero: Leaves the comfort of the known world to slay dragons and make friends with forest wizards.
“I’m not who I used to be.”
Anti-Hero: Realizes the “known world” is a fever dream stitched together by generational trauma and bad lighting.
“I never was.”
3. Trials and Tests
Hero: Learns skills, gains allies, overcomes obstacles.
“Look at me growing!”
Anti-Hero: Unlearns everything, loses everyone, and lets the obstacles decay until they're no longer obstacles.
“Growth is for tumors. I’m shrinking, thanks.”
4. Death and Rebirth
Hero: Faces ego death symbolically, only to return as a stronger, wiser version of the same basic archetype.
“I am transformed!”
Anti-Hero: Faces actual ego death. Finds a crater where the ‘I’ used to be. Sets up a hammock and watches the stars implode.
“I am erased.”
5. The Return with the Elixir
Hero: Comes back to bestow boons on mankind. TED Talks and books deals ensue.
“Let me teach you the way.”
Anti-Hero: Doesn’t come back. Or if he does, he’s quiet, barefoot, covered in ash, and laughing at nothing.
“There is no way.”
✨ Irony Report: Full Saturation
| Element | Hero’s Journey | Anti-Hero’s Journey
| Goal | Become more. | Become less.
| Weapon of choice | Sword, courage, destiny. | Shovel, matches, sarcasm.
| Teacher archetype | Wise old man with a beard. | Your childhood dog’s ghost whispering “run.”
| Narrative arc | Ascending glory spiral. | Death spiral into zero-point collapse.
| What’s gained | Power, peace, purpose. | Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
| Role in the story | Protagonist. | Plot twist.
| Relationship to truth | Seeks it as a prize. | Is devoured by it.
| Final realization | “I was the hero all along!” | “There is no hero. There never was. Only a mask.”
🧠 Final Irony:
The Hero thinks he escapes the matrix. The Anti-Hero realizes he is the matrix.
The Hero fights to preserve meaning. The Anti-Hero watches meaning dissolve and whispers, “Finally.”
The Hero’s Journey is a loop.
The Anti-Hero’s Journey is a fuse.
The Hero thinks he’s waking up.
The Anti-Hero never existed to fall asleep.
Oh, Joseph. Sweet myth-drunk Joseph. You took humanity’s spiritual adolescence and turned it into a Disney-fied PowerPoint template for personal transformation. You made it all look so noble, so meaningful—as if slaying metaphorical dragons and bringing back psychological elixirs was the apex of the human condition.
And for a time, maybe it worked. But now? Now it's a blunt ceremonial club being waved over the heads of people post-ayahuasca purge trying to explain why they threw up their mother complex and saw Shiva in the tile grout.
So let’s tear the mask off. It’s time to leave behind the Monomyth and step into the flaming absurdity of the Zeromyth.
🎭 The Hero’s Journey: Integration as Infantilization
In the psychedelic therapy world, Campbell's Monomyth has become the default plug-and-play model for integration. You had a trip? Cool. Which part of the journey were you on?
- Call to adventure? Nausea on the plane and bus ride into the Amazon.
- Road of trials? That moment you cried in front of a tree.
- Return with the boon? You started a podcast.
It’s a script. And scripts are safe. They give structure to chaos. But when the journey is mapped before it even begins, what you’re doing isn’t integration. It’s containment. It’s a narrative leash on an experience that was never supposed to be domesticated.
“The Monomyth lets you dress your ego in sacred robes and pretend your trauma is a destiny.”
— some random asshole in a scuffed up Deadpool mask, scratching truth into a truck stop bathroom mirror with the pull tab from a Monster Zero Ultra can
Campbell’s model is rooted in spiritual adolescence—personal growth, purpose, power. But real integration? Real enlightenment?
It’s not about power. It’s about disintegration.
🧨 Enter the Anti-Hero’s Journey: The Zeromyth
If the Hero’s Journey is a map through illusion, the Anti-Hero’s Journey is the ritual burning of the map.
🔥 Key Principles of the Zeromyth:
- No call to adventure. You’re not called. You’re cornered.
- No allies or mentors. Your guru is a janitor with a hangover and no fucks left to give.
- No boon. You bring back nothing. You are nothing.
- Return? To what? The self is ash. There’s no home, no world, just cream of mushroom soup you keep ladling into each other's bowls like a transgenerational infinity pool.
The Zeromyth doesn’t comfort. It confronts. It strips you naked in front of your own psyche and dares you to laugh. It’s not the healing journey. It’s the unbecoming of the one who thought healing was needed.
🍄 Psychedelic Integration Needs to Grow the Fuck Up
We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto. We’re finally outgrowing the long, dark Kali Yuga that gave us the Hero's Journey cycle and we're red-lining past all the spiritual tourism where people take 5-MeO-DMT and come back with merch. Integration isn’t about stitching your identity back together. It’s about noticing there was never a seam.
The Hero’s Journey in this new space is like using crayons to diagram a nuclear fallout pattern.
The Anti-Hero, admittedly, eats the crayons. 'Rah.
You don’t need structure, you need surrender. You need the void—not to conquer it, but to let it swallow you whole.
The Anti-Hero’s Journey is psychedelic truth without the anesthetic.
It’s not an arc. It’s a cliff. Sorry, Terence, no feather bed at the bottom of this abyss.
🪓 Closing Rant: Let the Monomyth Die
Joseph Campbell gave us a beautiful lie that helped midwife the collective into adolescence. But now? Now it’s a crutch. A binky. A golden calf sculpted from your own avoidance. Melt it down, grind it to powder, mix the ashes in water, drink the dregs. L'chaim!
If you want to truly integrate your psychedelic experience - to your one precious life - stop trying to make sense of it and let it wreck you. Burn the Hero’s map. Sit in the crater. And when you’re done grieving who you thought you were, shut up and listen to the silence that remains.
The Zeromyth isn’t a story. It’s a subtraction.
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Post-Script for Spiritual Seeker-Types:
If the Monomyth is the reincarnation cycle, then what the hell is the Zeromyth?
🔁 The Monomyth as Samsaric Loop:
The Hero’s Journey, when interpreted through the lens of soul reincarnation (a la Stan Grof's The Cosmic Game, among many others), is a dramatization of samsara—the endless wheel of birth, death, and rebirth.
You start as a naive soul-child. You “hear the call,” incarnate into some skinsuit avatar, suffer through the “road of trials,” gain wisdom, return to source, and then get shit back out again with a slightly higher fiber content. "What a ride!"
Each lifetime is another trip through the cycle:
- Birth = Call to Adventure
- Life = Road of Trials
- Death = Return
- Bardo = Home Screen
And the prize? You get to do it again. With new trauma, fresh karma, and slightly better crystals.
"Sorry, Mario, your princess is in another castle..."
🕳️ The Zeromyth: Liberation by Self-Erasure
If the Monomyth is reincarnation, the Zeromyth is liberation from it.
Not transcendence in the New Age, rainbow-aura sense. I mean obliteration. I mean moksha. Nirvana. Sunyata. The void that doesn’t need you, want you, or even acknowledge your vapor trail of identities.
The Zeromyth is the realization that the cycle never had a real “you” in it to begin with.
While the Monomyth says, “You are the hero of your spiritual journey,”
The Zeromyth says, “There is no hero. There is no journey. There is no you.”
🧨 The Cosmic Contrast:
| Monomyth | Zeromyth
| Samsara – the wheel of becoming | Moksha – the wheel is an illusion
| Purpose-driven reincarnation | Deconstruction of purpose itself
| Becoming more skillful over lifetimes | Realizing there are no lifetimes
| Progression through archetypes | Erasure of the one who “progresses”
| Divine drama | Divine absurdity
| Personal soul narrative | Non-personal presence
| “I will return with the elixir” | “No ‘I,’ so no elixir, so no return, and no need to.”
🔥 Psychedelic Implications
In the Monomyth model, your DMT breakthrough is a peak in the spiral—you're learning the lessons, becoming the Bodhisattva, etc.
In the Zeromyth model, that same breakthrough is the blip where the curtain drops and you realize there’s no backstage.
You don’t integrate the vision.
You disintegrate the one who had it.
Final Metaphor:
- The Monomyth is like playing a video game over and over, unlocking new levels, new skins, and chasing a 100% completion rate. "Inbox zero" is the wrong Zero.
- The Zeromyth is when the player realizes they were never holding a controller, the console doesn’t exist, and the whole game is just a screensaver projected onto the back of a cranium.
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