What Your Existential Depression Is Trying to Tell You

Are You The Hero In A Story That Isn't Yours?

Let's call the creator economy what it is: a sophisticated procrastination economy.

Its primary products aren't articles or videos. They're feelings.

The temporary feelings of clarity and certainty, sold to creators who are terrified of their own ambiguity. It's an entire ecosystem built on the irony that if people stopped buying courses on "how to make money online," 80% of the industry would collapse overnight.

It’s a game that creates a dangerous addiction. Not to social media. But to the constant, soul-crushing search for external validation (aka. needing strangers on the internet to tell you you're special).

The whole system runs on your need for significance.

Money, status, likes...

It exploits your insecurities, whispering that you lack something. That you’re not enough. Then, it conveniently sells you the short-term fix.

That burnout you feel has nothing to do with your work ethic. It’s the spiritual hangover from getting drunk on empty metrics

But the real cost isn't the wasted money on courses.

You feel empty despite living in a world of infinite abundance? You feel lonely despite being more connected than ever?

Congratulations. You're normal. Welcome to the existential depression of our society.

This is not just a feeling. It's a diagnosis.

The traditional "midlife crisis" has been replaced by a quarter-life crisis affecting an entire generation. In the last 30 years, anxiety among youth has skyrocketed. Severe psychological distress has increased by an astonishing 242%.

We've engineered a society that's better at producing distractions than resilient human beings.

We’re experiencing the largest mental health shift in modern history.

Those are the symptoms of a society horribly unprepared for what comes after our basic needs are met.

The industrial-age system that built our prosperity needed efficient workers, not sovereign individuals. It succeeded brilliantly. But it left us standing in a world of comfort, burdened with the one question it was never designed to answer:

"What am I actually supposed to do with my life?"

The Hero’s Journey (Creator Edition)

To understand the crisis of meaning that so many of us face, we first need to look at the map we’ve been given to navigate our lives. Even without the old religious maps, we are still following a story.

Because we are not given one, we unconsciously absorb the one our society tells us over and over again. You see it movies, read it in books, and feel it deep within your own ambitions to leave a mark on the world.

Many of you know it as The Hero’s Journey. It’s the most common and best know myth in the world. It has survived for thousands of years, encoded in the myths and legends that have always captivated the human soul.

It basically looks like this: a call to adventure → leaving the ordinary world to face a road of trials → slaying dragons and finding allies → fighting your way to a great victory.

For a creator it might look like this:

• The Call to Adventure was that first, undeniable urge to create, to share a piece of your soul with the world.

• The Road of Trials is the relentless grind of the creator economy. It's the struggle to master your craft while also decoding the unforgiving logic of the algorithm. It's battling the "dragons" of self-doubt, obscurity, and burnout, fighting for every single true fan.

• The Victory is the goal we are all told to chase: the subscribers, the financial freedom, the recognition that is meant to make the struggle worthwhile.

This is the necessary journey of the ego and it is the vital process to build its own strength and identity. It is fueled by willpower, determination, and the drive to find your place in the world.

When Willpower Is Not Enough

The Hero's Journey has a brutal limitation: it only values one outcome, which is "winning." But what happens when, despite all your effort, you hit a wall? The heroic map has no directions for this. It only tells you to try harder, to hustle more, to keep fighting.

This leads to two kinds of modern crisis:

1. The Crisis of the Struggling Hero: You are giving everything you have, but the victory remains out of reach. The audience doesn't grow, the breakthrough never comes. The purely heroic mindset offers no comfort here, only a sense of personal failure. It tells you that if you haven't won, you simply haven't tried hard enough. This can lead to a deep despair, a feeling that your journey is meaningless because you haven't reached the victory.

2. The Crisis of the Successful Hero: You have, against all odds, won. You've reached the goal and slain the dragon. But the "elixir" of success feels strangely hollow. The recognition doesn't fill the emptiness inside. The hero has won the game, but now feels lost in the very kingdom he fought so hard to build.

Notice that both creators arrive at the same place: a profound sense of meaninglessness. One feels it through a lack of external success, the other through the emptiness of it. Both have hit a wall, because both have discovered that willpower and achievement alone cannot satisfy the soul.

The Master Template for a Meaningful Life

How do we navigate the crisis of meaning when the map we have been given is incomplete? We find the way forward by doing what humanity has always done: we learn to see the deeper patterns.

Everything in life follows a pattern. Writing, marketing, entrepreneurship, all follow the same progression:

1. Pattern Recognition: You expose yourself to so many experiences that you begin to recognize the essential patterns. → This brings clarity.

2. Pattern Utilization: You apply those patterns, test them, and learn from your results. → This gives you power.

3. Pattern Creation: You internalize the patterns so deeply that you can begin to innovate and create your own. → This is mastery.

But how do you master the art of living? We only get one life and it can take decades to recognize its patterns. Well, we are not the first to take this journey. We can draw from the most incredible, time-tested body of knowledge ever: the collective wisdom of humanity itself. This universal wisdom is encoded in the myths, fairy tales, and religious stories that have survived for thousands of years.

Thinkers like the mythologist Joseph Campbell and the psychologist Carl Jung spent their lives studying these stories from every corner of the globe. They saw that beneath the vast differences in culture and context, the same fundamental patterns appeared again and again. They didn’t reinvent the wheel. They used pattern recognition to uncover a structure that already existed deep within the human psyche. They were simply giving us the language to use the patterns in our own lives.

We can distilled this ancient wisdom into a powerful “template” for psychological development. It provides a structure that helps you see where you are, not just in your overall life's journey, but within the smaller chapters and transitions as well.

Think of your life unfolding in a five-stage cycle:

1. Primal Wholeness (The Seed): We begin in a state of unconscious unity, full of latent potential but not yet aware of our own individuality.

2. The Hero's Journey (The Sprout): The ego must separate and emerge. It fights for its place in the sun, building strength, skills, and a distinct identity. This is the necessary stage of achievement.

3. The Crisis of Hybris (The Plant Outgrows its Pot): The heroic ego, having grown strong, becomes rigid and confined by its own success. It believes it is the whole plant, forgetting the soil from which it grew. This is the inevitable crisis that leads to stagnation.

4. The Call to Initiation (Transplanting): The pain of this confinement is a call to be moved to a larger space. The old form must be broken. The ego must undergo a symbolic "death" and surrender to the larger system of life.

5. The Rebirth of Individuation (New Growth): The ego is "reborn" into a dynamic, conscious relationship with the deep, authentic center of the psyche. This integration allows for a new, more expansive phase of growth.

This five-stage cycle represents the master template for a meaningful life. You leave the Primal Wholeness of childhood, live out your Hero's Journey, face a great Initiation into maturity, and move toward Individuation. It’s a journey of a lifetime.

This master template is extremely powerful because it’s not only representing life as whole. It is the journey of a lifetime precisely because it happens over and over again. Within the great cycle of life, you will live through many smaller versions of the exact same cycle.

Think of it as a spiral. The final stage of one cycle, folds back again into the first stage of another. But this time you begin the next cycle on a higher level of consciousness, with a broader perspective than before.

Recognizing this repeating pattern is the first step toward consciously participating in your own growth. It gives you immense clarity and it is the beginning of wisdom.

It allows you to see that the difficult and painful events are not random. They are meaningful and necessary steps on the path to a deeper and more authentic existence.

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(Note: This template is not set in stone. The patterns are universal, but your journey is unique. There are no rigid rules. The way these stages unfold will look different for every single person.)

The Forgotten Path of Initiation

Now that you can recognize the map, you can begin to use it. The next level of master is pattern utilization. That means learning to apply the template to your own journey.

Ancient cultures had a powerful way for guiding individuals through life's difficult transitions and connecting them to a deeper sense of meaning: the rite of initiation.

We can still find tribes practicing this today. For example a young man gets abandoned in the jungle and has to find his back home before he is considered a real member of the community.

From the jungle tribes of the Amazon to the schools of ancient Greece, the pattern was the same. Elders would guide the young away from the safety of their old identities to establish a new, more mature footing in the world.

Today, we are largely on our own. Our society teaches the first part of the Hero’s Journey but provides no map for the path that comes after. That is why so many of us get stuck. We become trapped in the late Hero stage, with no rites or elders to guide us into the next phase of our own maturity.

The crisis of meaning is our modern and private rite of initiation. It is a signal that you are being called to the second, more important part of the journey. This part does not take place in the outer world of achievement, but in the inner world of the soul.

It is the moment when you are called to make a fundamental shift, moving from the path of the Hero to the path of the Initiate. These two paths are governed by completely opposite principles:

• The motto of the Hero’s Journey is: "I will conquer."

• The motto of the Initiation is: "I will surrender."

Surrender is the hardest and most important lesson. It doesn’t mean weakness in this context. Instead it demands courage to let go of the one thing that has defined you until now: the illusion that your ego is in control.

In the ancient rites, the novice for initiation is called upon to give up willful ambition and all desire and to submit to a higher power. He must be willing to experience this trial without hope of success. In fact, he must be prepared to die. Although this might not happen he has to be willing to suffer.

That’s what an initiation demands from us today as well. An initiation is a symbolic death of the old self to allow for the rebirth of a truer, more whole self.

Think of a Jedi Knight in Star Wars. Luke Skywalker's hero journey is about developing power and defeating the Empire. But Yoda's training is an initiation. He must go into the cave and face his shadow. He must learn to "let go" and trust the Force. He has to surrender his heroic ego to become a true, wise Jedi.

Your Calling Is Calling

As we have seen, the journey of life is composed of many cycles forming a spiral. You have already been through several initiations without even knowing it: the initiation into adolescence, the initiation out of your family home, the initiation into your first real career. Each one demanded a "death" of an old self to allow a new one to be born.

But the initiation that follows the crisis of meaning is more profound, more challenging, and more critical than any other. Everything that has come before is preparation: building your ego, finding your skills, and proving your worth to the world.

It’s the transition from early maturity to middle age, which in our society usually arrives between the ages of 35 and 40, though it can be triggered by a crisis at any time. It is special and more powerful because it represents a fundamental change in the purpose of the spiral itself.

This is where your life has the chance to become truly meaningful and spiritually satisfying. I call it The Initiation of the Soul.

At its core it’s about discovering your calling.

A calling is not a passion you choose or a mission you design with your intellect. The word itself is a clue. Your life is calling on you. And it’s presenting you with a crisis or a challenge as an invitation to enter the next, deeper level of your own story.

There are many forms in which the Initiation of the Soul can show up. Here are some common examples:

• As the classic mid-life crisis: You've achieved success, but you are haunted by a sense of unhappiness and futility.

• As a burnout: The passion that once fueled you has turned to ash, leaving you feeling empty and exhausted.

• As a sudden illness, loss, or failure: An event that shatters your sense of control and forces you to confront life’s ultimate questions.

Seeing and grasping this opportunity is essential. Your life will keep on calling on you until you answer. And it won’t do so in a way you find very pleasant. Most people in our society get stuck here. Life is comfortable, the pain not strong enough to change, so they ignore the call. That’s how you end up living a life of unfulfilled potential haunted by a constant feeling of emptiness.

The initiation forces a fundamental shift in life’s central question. The question is no longer "What can I achieve in the world?"

The question becomes: "Who am I, really? And what is my life asking of me?"

This is the most important transition a person can make. In this process the existential vacuum is filled and your life and your work transform from a performance into a true calling.

You now have the master template that gives you a map for this journey. But a map is only useful if you know how to read it. To navigate the often dark and confusing territory of the soul, you will need a compass. This where archetypes become useful.

Your Guides On The Journey

Archetypes are the universal patterns of human motivation and meaning that live deep within all of us. They are the recurring characters that appear in every myth, every fairy tale, and in your own psyche. They are the guides for your journey and act like a magnetic forces that give your inner compass its direction. When you learn to recognize them within yourself, they illuminate the path ahead.

I have written an article about archetypes that goes more into the details. If you want to learn more, you can check it out here.

Each of us has a dominant archetype, a core pattern that shapes our worldview, motivates our actions, and defines our greatest strengths and most difficult challenges. Getting to know your dominant archetypal patterns is the first practical step you can take on your journey. It’s like being given the specific legend for your unique map, showing you where to find North.

If you want a pragmatic starting point, begin by noticing patterns in your life. Which narratives keep replaying? Which roles do you revert to under stress? Answering those questions is the beginning of practical self-knowledge.

To make this immediately actionable, I have developed the Archetype Navigator to help you discover your dominant archetype.

It’s a free tool that helps you discover your core patterns and use those insight to step into your own journey. This is the final level of mastery. You stop looking for patterns externally and start creating from the one within.

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The more you understand the map of initiation and learn to trust your inner guides, the more meaningful your journey will become. It reveals the underlying blueprint that already exists within you.

Your work as a creator is one vital part of that blueprint. It becomes the vehicle through which you give your purpose a voice, a form, a way to connect with the world. That’s how your business starts being an authentic expression of the person you are becoming.

It is difficult to describe the power of this shift in words. It is something you must feel. Don't just trust my words. Trust the process. If you have the courage to go deep, to answer the call of your own initiation, your life will become so charged with meaning that you will have no choice but to trust where it leads.