We scuttle through an age of dreadful freedom. The old gods are corpses, and the silence they left behind screams at us. In this void, we claw for concepts to dress the wound of existence—not for truth, but for anesthetic. We crave vital lies, simple fables that allow us to march toward the abyss without looking down.
One such fable, the most ancient and necessary, is the idea of heroism. It is the grand, gilded lie we tell ourselves to drown out the whisper that nothing we do will ever matter. As William James coldly observed, mankind has always held the world to be a theatre for heroism, because the alternative—a stage for meaningless suffering—is too paralyzing to bear.
This is not a noble calling. It is a frantic, biological rebellion against the truth of our own decay. To understand its modern grotesquerie, we must view it through the lens of those who stared into the abyss without blinking: the existentialists and the dark psychologists.
The Absurd Stage: Existentialism and the Burden of Choice
Where Freud saw narcissism, the existentialists like Sartre and Camus saw bad faith—the flight from the terrifying weight of our own freedom. We are “condemned to be free,” thrown into a universe devoid of inherent meaning, forced to invent a self from nothing.
The “heroism” we construct is our attempt to build a cage of meaning around this freedom. It is a performance to convince ourselves we are not, in fact, random biological flotsam in a cold, indifferent cosmos. Camus understood this in The Myth of Sisyphus: the only serious philosophical question is suicide. Everything else—all our heroics—is a way of deciding not to kill ourselves, of finding a reason to push the rock up the hill one more time, even as it eternally rolls back down.
This is the morbid core: heroism is a life-support system for a creature that knows it is dying.
The Digital Abattoir: Social Media and the Illusion of Choice
Our modern stage for this desperate performance is the digital carnival. And here, the existential crisis takes on a new, hyper-charged form.
1. The Tyranny of Abundant Choice:
We are not liberated by our countless options; we are atomized by them. Every potential profile, every curated aesthetic, every possible life path becomes not an opportunity, but a monument to a life not lived. This paralysis of choice is a direct manifestation of existential dread. To choose one identity is to murder all others, a constant, low-grade mourning for the phantom selves we sacrifice to maintain a coherent narrative. Our heroism becomes a desperate, fleeting commitment to one mask among millions.
2. The Queen of the Carnival: Female Presentation as a Morbid Game:
Nowhere is this more stark than in the social media dynamics surrounding women. The platform becomes a brutal, silent colosseum. A woman with a vast following of admirers is not merely “popular”; she is engaged in a high-stakes performance of existential validation.
Each “admirer” is not a person, but a flickering vote for her constructed self’s reality. She is the architect of her own meaning, building a fortress of likes and DMs to hold back the void. The sheer number of choices—of suitors, of aesthetics, of potential lives broadcast by rivals—does not empower. It creates a haunting counter-narrative of lack. Every other woman’s success is a reminder of her own possible inadequacy; every ignored message is a tiny, digital intimation of mortality. It is a relentless, silent war where the prize is the temporary conviction that one’s existence is justified, that one is, for a moment, a heroine in a story rather than a organism in a void.
This is sibling rivalry weaponized by the internet, a global, adult-scale replay of the child’s cry: “But she has more than me!” The currency is no longer juice, but existential security.
The Morbid Conclusion: A Scream into the Data-Stream
The crisis of modern heroism is that the lies are no longer strong enough to hold. The heroics of consumerism are a “plain debasing and silly” pantomime. The quest for digital validation is a ghost that demands more and more blood (data) for less and less sustenance.
We are all, in the end, like Erich Fromm’s narcissist, desperately trying to re-create the whole world out of ourselves even if no one else existed. The thought frightens us because we know, in our morbid hearts, that we cannot.
So we post. We consume. We accumulate followers and lovers and possessions not out of joy, but as a screaming, symbolic protest against the grave. We pile up these digital and material goods like stones upon our own tombs, hoping the weight will pin us to an earth that feels increasingly unreal.
The most honest question one can ask in this ghastly carnival is not “How do I become a hero?” but “What kind of lie am I willing to live for?” And, in our darkest moments, when the notifications cease and the screen goes black, we are left with the only question that ever truly mattered: is the performance enough to make you forget the curtain will inevitably fall?