I thought I’d try to pluck one small thing from my past year to share. What came to mind is a little shift that happened in my taste for stories that might reflect a cultural shift. For most I’ve my life I’ve gravitated toward hero stories, which I recognized in my twenties when I read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces. This book formed the foundation of my understanding of story, one that I tended to apply to all stories in a “more is better” kind of way. This year I’ve noticed a tendency to gravitate away from grandiose hero stories and toward a kind of story where the hero’s journey is so small or de-emphasized that it becomes almost undetectable.

As with so many developments in my life, Ann led me to this one. It started with fireplaces and trains, which came to us via the large television (our first) that we inherited from my dad. We were determined not to let the TV inject too much degrading mainstream slop into our lives. Ann applied herself to finding things to put on the TV that felt good. Almost as a joke she starting playing videos of fireplaces. The TV is mounted above our fake electric fireplace, which sits in front of the real fireplace we never use. Surprisingly these videos fit nicely into our lives and we found endless varieties on YouTube to choose from. I didn’t think of them as stories at first, perhaps because they didn’t fit my learned hero framework. But now I see them as very open, flexible stories that we can incorporate into our lives in much the same way as any story. At first, though, I just experienced them as a new and refreshing kind of TV.

Next came trains. Ann has always been attracted to trains, so why not invite them onto the TV? Producers like Rail Cowgirl started to get almost as much screen time as fires, simply turning the TV into a train driver’s view. This expanded eventually to include minimalist train travel videos. These have a sort of protagonist, but we prefer the kind with no dialog or grand narrative other than navigating between cars, eating meals, and demonstrating every minute feature available on the conveyance with some occasionally humorous textual commentary. You might cram this into the hero framework, but in a refreshingly humble way.

It wasn’t until 2024 that I became aware that my idea of what a story is had changed, and that I had started looking for and appreciating this new kind of story. It feels like an antidote to the onslaught of extreme super-hero stories. We found that the no-dialog approach has also been adopted by hikers and probably many other storytellers. In a different medium I found that I appreciate hiking blogs that focus more on description and less on narrative. An email newsletter from a relative describes a morning of running errands in detail, and I’m enraptured. Even books like The Quickening by Elizabeth Rush that describe something adventurous like journeying to Antarctica on a science expedition resist many facets of the hero framework, and that captured my interest.

I think if my younger self read this little essay he might conclude that my taste has retreated into the humdrum, rebelling by seeking out the most boring content imaginable. It is possible that as I age I gain patience for less overtly stimulating material. I can only protest that I experience a richness in these stories that the hero framework doesn’t seem to recognize, a beauty it distracts us from.

I haven’t abandoned the hero’s journey. It still applies to plenty of my media diet. I just wanted to share this tidbit: there is more.