Why we need heroes

There has been a seemingly large increase in popularity for the self-help sphere, where authors have extracted morals and lessons from various real-world stories and packaged these into discrete lessons for a wide audience. Whilst this is very helpful and can be highly motivating, the genre is often criticised for lacking sincerity and can at times feel like the exploitation of the audience, providing cheap advice to people down on their luck. An idea I heard from a very interesting YouTube video (linked at the bottom of this article) is that fictional stories and characters can provide a more meaningful basis for a lot of the lessons and morals we search for through the use of narrative devices and characterization. This opens up a wider conversation about how fictional stories create very real impacts on our lives, which is what I want to discuss today. The narratives we consume and characters we idolise expose us to the fuel we need to construct our own stories and give us unique perspectives that we can’t find simply by analysing the real world.

I’m a big fan of the Halo games. I played the first game when I was only 6 years old on my old family computer back at home, and without a doubt, it is the highest-impact piece of media I’ve ever consumed. The Master Chief is the protagonist of the franchise and is an archetypical tough guy space marine sort of dude. Throughout the games, you play as the Master Chief and help save the universe from some evil aliens, completing all sorts of hopeless missions and beating the odds every time. While the Chief is a pretty straightforward hero, his character has sat with me for a long time. There was something about this masked stoic who never complained, did what was necessary, fought hard to protect others, and sacrificed himself for the greater good that left an impression on me at a young age.

The Master Chief was cool for sure, but more importantly, I think I recognised the character as something of an idol and became an unorthodox role model in my young life. Having grown up since then, I think the values that the Master Chief champions through these games are not that different from the same ethics and values that I’ve come to respect and have a desire to cultivate in myself as an adult. Interestingly, there seems to be a common through line with the Master Chief and all sorts of other characters I’ve found myself in awe of, both real and fictional. Even more so, I’ve begun to notice that a lot of the characteristics that the heroes of my childhood upheld are even replicated in a lot of this self-help content I alluded to earlier. For instance, in the book How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie promotes never complaining or criticising others, even when events aren’t favourable.

The stoic principle of accepting your lot and doing what must be done is also demonstrated through how the Master Chief approaches the various challenges in the Halo games. Not once does he complain or criticise others. He simply figures out how to get the job at hand complete and accepts responsibility for doing so. What’s interesting is that How to Win Friends and Influence People is one of the prototypical self-help books and is very direct with its advice to the reader. The Master Chief is a green space marine who shoots aliens in a video game made for teenagers. I’ve read How to Win Friends and Influence People, and when I find my life getting hard and needing to do things I’d rather not, I always think of the Master Chief (as silly as this sounds), but rarely do I ponder Dale Carnegie's book.

And I think this gets to the crux of why we need heroes and why we need to read stories. Heroes in our life (whether real or fictional) create genuine touchstones to the values and ethics we are trying to cultivate in our own lives, because their stories, struggles, and triumphs are far easier for us to visualise and connect with than the direct point-by-point advice provided by self-help books. The inverse of this idea is also correct; the villains and antagonists we read about can also serve as cautionary tales of evil in the world and what we stand to lose if we fail to uphold these aforementioned values.

Fictional heroes, as opposed to real-world ones, have the added benefit of not having to uphold the standards of reality. The Master Chief is a pretend soldier, and because he's fighting nameless aliens, he is not stained with the messier, human flaws that many real-world heroes are. There are no skeletons in his closet, because he wasn’t written with any. This means that he can serve as a more ideal example and can be more easily idolised without worry of what else might be at play. Real-world heroes, whilst important and nearly as useful as fictional ones, are impossible to completely idolise in their entirety because, like us, they are complicated real-world people who are flawed and imperfect.

You will already hold particular stories and characters close to your heart, regardless of if you’ve reflected on how or why. Throughout your life, you will have heard tales (fictional or real) about people and events that have shaped you and will have a natural fondness for those stories that resonate with some moral essence of your character. Based on what I’ve said, I think it is important to reflect on these stories and characters and figure out who the heroes in your life are. Who are the characters you look up to? What values do they uphold? How similar are you to them, and would you say you are becoming more like them in your values, or are you slowly drifting away? It sounds silly to me sometimes, given I’ve admitted that one of the biggest heroes in my life is a green soldier who shoots aliens, but oftentimes how closely (which is up to you to decide) you mirror your heroes can provide a bizarrely useful litmus test for the quality of your life decisions.

The advantage of having these heroes named in your head and their values well understood is that this can also provide a very powerful way in which you can manage unknown situations. Thinking to yourself, how would a character I idolise do in this situation? Again, it sounds overly simple and somewhat naive, but in those truly unknown situations, any north star to help orient your actions can be greatly appreciated. This touches on a somewhat related concept, which is using yourself or a perfect avatar of yourself as this hero. For instance, when considering what you should do about your finances, the exercise of asking, “What would a rich man do in my position?” or “If I were a perfect being, what would that version of me do?”. These might sound overly obvious, but they are exercises that allow your mind to wander past your own preconceived notions of your abilities and shortcomings that can help generate more creative solutions. This concept of using your hero as a proxy for what you should do works in a similar way, by allowing your mind to use simulated examples as a best estimate for what action might produce the best outcome in a given circumstance.

The idea of understanding why heroes are so important came to me after I started training for my Ironman, when I realised that completing this race was a big step towards being in line with a lot of the fictional characters I wished I could be like as a 6-year-old boy. This brought me a lot of strength, and I encourage you to do the same in considering which stories and characters you look up to and would like to follow the examples of. When I was in the low points of training and racing, having tales of heroism and perseverance to draw upon gave me a reason to keep going that object real-world motivations couldn’t provide. In assessing your heroes, I think you are able to both increase your understanding of what values you want to uphold and gain a true source of strength that you can draw on in difficult and uncertain times.