The Adventure You’re Avoiding

LIFE ON URTH - Episode 115

You are a pattern that moves across a spectrum ranging from heroic to villainous.

It’s important to realize that there is no escaping this. The way you meet the world in each moment is a move either towards the heroic pole or towards the villainous.

It’s easy to see that doom-scrolling on the couch isn’t heroic. But how is it villainous? Isn’t that too strong a term?

Let’s first decipher what it means to be the hero, then it’ll become clear why wasting your time with reels is a villainous act.

The world of experience, which is the only world you have, can be fundamentally divided into two areas: the known and the unknown. Those are not purely geographical. Your room can turn into unknown territory real fast if a snake comes crawling out from under the bed.

You move between the known and the unknown depending on how intact your internal maps of the world are. Those maps are supposed to answer the fundamental navigational questions of being:

Where am I?
Where should I go?
How do I get there?

Sudden emergence of the unknown invalidates your maps. It means that at least your mode of action stopped producing the desired result (getting you from where you are to where you should be). That’s unpleasant but easy to fix: just try a different approach.

It’s the deeper invalidations we really fear, because they could mean that you don’t even know where you are. Take the snake appearing in your bedroom. Suddenly that’s not your bedroom anymore, but a version of hell.

As finite beings, we are forever surrounded by the chaotic forces of the unknown. It’s how we deal with this reality that makes us heroic or villainous.

The hero explores the unknown voluntarily to update their map and that of their society.

Your inner villain moves in the opposite direction. Instead of updating the map, you protect it from reality. At first, this may look like simple avoidance: distracting yourself before the unknown can fully emerge. When avoidance fails, it can harden into denial or dogmatism, forcing new information into old categories. And if the unknown still refuses to fit, the villainous impulse may even be to silence or eliminate its source entirely.

These responses differ in intensity, but not in direction. All of them sacrifice new information to preserve the safety of the known.

This isn’t only an abstraction from mythology and other narratives. Voluntary exploration of the unknown is an important principle of modern clinical psychology, for example in the exposure therapy of anxiety disorders.

You need to become the hero of your life, or you'll become the villain. Doom-scrolling is the opposite of voluntary exploration and that’s why it’s villainous. It’s a hyper-distraction, a flood of shallow and short-lived band-aids for the gaping holes in your map. It distorts the most important tool on the heroic path: your attention.

The particular ‘unknowns’ waiting to be faced could be the threat of unopened letters, the pain of having a difficult conversation, or something entirely different. You yourself know best what will emerge when you sit still and allow it space.

Behind all that waits something else, something bigger: the unknown of your own potential, which you betray by not embarking on the adventure of exploring what you could be.

I’m not talking about financial success, but about being the best partner you can be. About becoming a pillar to your local community. About embracing tough conversations and being grateful despite the hardships of life.

I’m writing this from Sri Lanka, my beautiful wife’s home. Yesterday was our three-year anniversary. We spent it immersed in our creative projects, discussing ideas and visions over great food, then wandering through parts of Colombo we had never explored before.

It wasn’t a heroic adventure in the cinematic sense. But it was a day shaped by curiosity rather than distraction: creating something that didn’t exist before, exploring unfamiliar territory and discovering more of who we might become together.

Life is good.
This is what I created yesterday.

Remember: The heroic confrontation is undertaken voluntarily and fuelled by curiosity. The villain instead suppresses the unknown, fails to gain new information, and is therefore stuck with his beliefs.

It’s not enough to read this. Finding a heroic mindset in the midst of a storm takes practice. Start right now: reach out to that person you need to share something with. Create some space instead of diving into the next distraction. Exercise or cook yourself something nice.

Stay curious, fam.

✒️ Quote of the Week: “Not knowing how near the truth is, people seek it far away.” -Hakuin Ekaku

🎧 Song of the Week: Joseph Ray - Changing Lanes

Now I’d love to hear from you!

Did something in my writing catch your attention?
Was there an idea you found particularly intriguing?
Or is there a question that’s been on your mind related to these topics?

Just reply to this email or write to me at mail@urth.blog 👈

All the best,

Adrian / Urth

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