Our content is telling a story, about us as individuals, and us as a grand unified humanity.
The last five years have seen key storytelling trends emerge.
The rise of the larger-than-life films with larger-than-life-heroes.
The increased trust in individual creators.
The non-religious gurus.
The comeback to institutional faith.
And all trends are indicators of something more.
Jung and his two most famous ideas
In 1916, Carl Jung wrote an essay, introducing the idea of “the collection unconscious”. It basically means that all humans share a common unconscious through our shared ancestry. This idea can be described as a oneness. It means that no matter how different our individual experiences, dig a little deeper and we will find we have common anxieties and desires, hopes and disappointments, a commonness in how we experiences the world as humans.
This commonality, he said, gave birth to four main archetypes (the persona, the shadow, the anima/animus, and the self). These “intermingled to give rise to 12 archetypical figures“. They are
I think each generation demands, and births one or more archetypes. Let’s call that the dominant archetypes. The dominant archetypes are a reflection of the collective unconscious. And that is how trends are birthday, and some solidify to become cultural movements, and then they grow bigger and bigger and become what we can “generational change”.
Storytelling’s a Mirror
Through the 1940s, Saadat Hasat Manto, the Urdu writer, was charged for writing obscene stories, six times. Defending that charge, and the social label associated he has said, “If you cannot bear these stories then the society is unbearable. Who am I to remove the clothes of this society, which itself is naked. I don’t even try to cover it, because it is not my job, that’s the job of dressmakers.”
The fastest-to-consumer stories are the truest mirrors. At the time Manto was writing, short stories in publications was that medium. Then movies replaced that. And now short form videos are replacing movies.
Let’s look at the last 31 years of movies and TV. When I was a child, family dramas like Hum Paanch, Hum Saath Saath Hain, did really well. This reflected the norm. Then, a slew of romantic movies from Dil Toh Pagal Hain to Kaho Na Pyaar Hain skirted the idea of breaking norms, Exploring themselves and their lives. Think of films like Salaam Namaste to Dil Chahta Hain; unconventionality became dominant. At the same time, the focus shifted on the helplessness of the middle-class and the common man – film after film that exposed the ‘dark underbelly’ of everything – from politics and the film industry, to the world of corporate. We, the Innocents, were shown how systems were broken and that everyone was but a pawn in the games of a few powerful men.
The dominant archetype of today
I have only spoken of films, and the stories we consume, but our collective helplessness can be seen in everything. The thin ice on which civic rights stand, unemployment rates, crumbling economies, a deepening and what scientists have called, “an irreversible” climate crisis, a terribly uncertain future for those without fuck-you money. Education does not matter like it used to, jobs and careers don’t matter like they used to, political elections don’t matter like they used to. We trust nothing – not the food we consume, the medicines we take, the God we believe in, or the media that is supposed to tell us our truth.
Crumbling systems, rising professional uncertainty, confused social structures, climate breakdowns; we are on unsure footing with every breath we take today (literally).
We all feel this to some extent, so much that we invented a whole new term to describe it. Doom-scrolling.
We feel lost, stripped of agency, helpless in ways we have never experienced before.
And our collective unconsciousness searches for new dominant archetypes.
Anyone who can convince us that yes, all is not lost.
Someone strong enough to help us find stable footing.
Something we can cling on to.
Enter The Hero
Today’s heroes and sages look different though. They are not riding on horseback with a sword in hand, they are not fighting the wars against occupations, they are not even gods. Because we live less on battlefields and actual temples than we do online.
So we have given rise to Instagram therapists, YouTube gurus (The Sage), LinkedIn founders, and action stars (The Hero).
The mediums have changed — the psychology hasn’t.
We need strong shoulders to stand on. When we don’t know what to do with money, we don’t want to read about financial markets.
We want to listen to Nikhil Kamath and Morgan Housel tell us about it.
When we don’t know what to do with civic instability, we want SRK, Salman, Prabhas to jump of a high bridge or tower and take bad guys down.
When we don’t know how to pay for rent in our city, or afford good food, when we want a solution to the confused politics of our times, we race to Zohran Mamdani to tell us as an individual, yes it’s possible. The Democrats as a collective entity suffered, but the individuals rose. Or you might pick another figure. Not a party. But the human representing it.
Every hero today is talking to you about hard truths, and then following it up with comforting affirmations.
Personal brands are not marketing tools – they are myth-reflecting and myth-making machines.
And every successful creator today, from Beer Biceps to The Rebel Kid, are canvases on which we project our collective unconscious. They are successful because they are writing themselves into this myth.
And they follow the monomyth, which Joseph Campbell spelt out in 1949, following a hero’s journey. They show wounds (The Call to Adventure), setbacks (The Abyss), breakthroughs (The Reward), and renewed purpose (The Return). Their stories feel like transformation in real-time. But this intimacy is strategic.
Platforms reward personality, vulnerability, and story arcs — because audiences crave relatable hope.
The era of corporate anonymity is over. People no longer trust faceless organizations. That’s why companies now build around founder personas.
That’s why the Ambanis were on our feed every day for the last year, because ‘Reliance’ was enough in Dhirubhai’s era. Not in today’s.
That’s why we go to Faye D’souza and Ravish Kumar, not a newspaper or news channel.
That’s why logos and mission statements have been replaced by faces. People you can blame, but also people whom you can trust.
In this strange, unstable moment, personal brands offer us temporary clarity. They package identity, purpose, and hope in bite-sized, algorithm-friendly ways.
Every social platform is littered with these micro-heroes – someone indirectly whispering: “Don’t worry, I got you”
They rise and they fall, the tides of time
Where does it leave us, when we project collective hope onto individuals?
Heroes are humans; they will falter and fail (and we will not accept that. We will cancel them).
Heroes are humans; they will burn out.
Heroes are humans; they will become greedy.
Heroes are humans; they will change their minds.
Heroes are humans; they will project every bias on what they do, say, and share. And we will eventually catch up.
What happens to our collective selves when we find that the people we looked up to are no longer able to rescue us from ourselves?
Where do we go to find the belief we lost when we put our faith in others?
My sense is that once heroes fall, we begin to look inward. We begin to look our for each other. I see the seeds of this growing every day. Even our super heroes want to first heal themselves, before they save the world.
They are getting ready to find the demons and the angels within themselves.
They are beginning to see the value of collective action. Across the world where the hero’s have fallen, they have also transformed the community into standing up for themselves.
The myth seduces us into waiting for a savior — when what we need is a system that doesn’t require saving. And in between the buzz-words of company culture and work-life balance, creating and building, design thinking, we are finding that we might just create new systems for ourselves.
It’s not happening everywhere at once. Some geographies are clearly better equipped to bring this to life. Some are still catching up.
But the new myth will be community-driven. The Everyman will want to feel Belonged, and turn Caregiver in Service of those immediately around them. We will seek the Jester more, the Explorer more, and in that chase, we will find that both exist within us.