And we are now faced with complacency; we don’t have to fight to survive, we can live, and we are freer than ever. Life has never been better. Yes, there are still wars, there is still hunger, and there are still pandemics in the world, but life quality and expectancy have never been as high as it is now. Yet we become disenchanted with life and our existence, and now we look outside ourselves for happiness, peace, validation, and meaning.
© Elke T.B. Stevens, 2020
When I wrote these words in 2020, I sensed a paradox but perhaps underestimated its significance. Five years later, it is becoming clearer that freedom and comfort do not automatically bring meaning or purpose. And with it, the absence of daily survival struggles has left us wide open to new forms of hunger — for connection, authenticity, belonging and social evolution. And where there is hunger, there are always industries ready to feed into our cravings and sell us food that does not truly nourish.
The promise of happiness has become a commodity in itself; happiness has become a marketing strategy. “Raise your vibration,” “manifest abundance,” “think positive”. These phrases now fill the space where collective struggle and shared meaning once lived. They give us the illusion of agency while subtly reinforcing passivity. They tell us that suffering is a personal failure, that exhaustion is a mindset, that discontent is a lack of gratitude, and fail to explain biology.
As Nietzsche warned more than a century ago, when meaning collapses, we are vulnerable to what he called “false consolations”, easy answers that soothe but do not transform, the quick-fix culture in the West of today. In our time, these consolations are packaged as self-help slogans, Instagram mantras, and workshops that promise transcendence for a fee. Hannah Arendt also spoke of the danger of mass culture eroding authentic thought, replacing depth with consumable surface.
But what I see now is that our disenchantment is not a flaw in us, but a signal. It shows that human beings are not designed to live only for comfort, nor to be satisfied with purchased meaning. But to restore our concept of “the wise man” and walk again the path of “the homo sapiens” and own up to the intelligent beings we are. We long for the depth that comes from shared struggle, authentic connection, and facing the painful truths of existence without being silenced by smiles or slogans.
Even society goes through a hero’s journey. Joseph Campbell described how myth mirrors human development: descent, trial, transformation, and return. We are not static; we move through cycles of comfort, crisis, and (sometimes) renewal. Right now, we are in the belly of the whale in a penumbra, we are deep in the stage of disconnection: from each other, from our bodies, from the earth. The divide shows up not only in politics or global conflicts, but even in the smallest communities, where mistrust, rigidity and isolation creep in.
Yet even here, deep in a collective dark night of the soul, positivity is not the enemy. Hope, gratitude, joy, and playfulness are vital human forces; they help us endure hardship, connect with one another, and imagine better futures. The danger is not in positivity itself, but in its distortion: when it is demanded, commodified, or used to erase real pain.
If the hero’s journey teaches us anything, it is that descent is not the end. It is the necessary darkness before re-emergence, the depth, discomfort, and transformative potential of the moment. Positivity, when grounded in truth, can be the torch we carry through that darkness not to deny it, but to help us keep moving until we find our way back to one another.
© Elke T.B. Stevens, 16/08/2025
Notes from a Time Traveller by Elke Stevens 
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