What do Harry Potter, Katniss Everdeen, and Frodo all have in common with the heroes of ancient myths?
(Roar) What if I told you they are all variants of the same hero?
Do you believe that?
Joseph Campbell did.
He studied myths from all over the world and published a book called "The Hero with a Thousand Faces," retelling dozens of stories and explaining how each represents the mono-myth, or Hero's Journey.
So, what is the "hero's journey"?
Think of it as a cycle.
The journey begins and ends in a hero's ordinary world, but the quest passes through an unfamiliar, special world.
Along the way, there are some key events.
Think about your favorite book or movie.
Does it follow this pattern?
Status quo, that's where we start.
1:00: Call to Adventure.
The hero receives a mysterious message.
An invitation, a challenge?
2:00: Assistance The hero needs some help, probably from someone older, wiser.
3:00: Departure The hero crosses the threshold from his normal, safe home, and enters the special world and adventure.
We're not in Kansas anymore.
4:00: Trials Being a hero is hard work: our hero solves a riddle, slays a monster, escapes from a trap.
5:00: Approach It's time to face the biggest ordeal, the hero's worst fear.
(Roar) 6:00: Crisis This is the hero's darkest hour.
He faces death and possibly even dies, only to be reborn.
7:00: Treasure (Roar) As a result, the hero claims some treasure, special recognition, or power.
8:00: Result This can vary between stories.
Do the monsters bow down before the hero, or do they chase him as he flees from the special world?
9:00: Return After all that adventure, the hero returns to his ordinary world.
10:00: New Life This quest has changed the hero; he has outgrown his old life.
11:00: Resolution All the tangled plot lines get straightened out.
12:00: Status Quo, but upgraded to a new level.
Nothing is quite the same once you are a hero.
Many popular books and movies follow this ancient formula pretty closely.
But let's see how well "The Hunger Games" fits the hero's journey template.
When does Katniss Everdeen hear her call to adventure that gets the story moving?
When her sister's name is called from the lottery.
How about assistance?
Is anyone going to help her on her adventure?
Haymitch.
What about departure?
Does she leave her ordinary world?
She gets on a train to the capital.
OK, so you get the idea.
What do you have in common with Harry Potter, Katniss Everdeen, and Frodo?
Well, you're human, just like them.
The Hero's Journey myth exists in all human cultures and keeps getting updated, because we humans reflect on our world through symbolic stories of our own lives.
You leave your comfort zone, have an experience that transforms you, and then you recover and do it again.
You don't literally slay dragons or fight Voldemort, but you face problems just as scary.
Joseph Campbell said, "In the cave you fear to enter lies the treasure you seek."
What is the symbolic cave you fear to enter?
Auditions for the school play?
Baseball tryouts?
Love?
Watch for this formula in books, movies, and TV shows you come across.
You will certainly see it again.
But also be sensitive to it in your own life.
Listen for your call to adventure.
Accept the challenge.
Conquer your fear and claim the treasure you seek.
And then, do it all over again.
Sadness is part of the human experience, but for centuries there has been vast disagreement over what exactly it is and what, if anything, to do about it.
In its simplest terms, sadness is often thought of as the natural reaction to a difficult situation.
You feel sad when a friend moves away or when a pet dies.
When a friend says, "I'm sad," you often respond by asking, "What happened?"
But your assumption that sadness has an external cause outside the self is a relatively new idea.
Ancient Greek doctors didn't view sadness that way.
They believed it was a dark fluid inside the body.
According to their humoral system, the human body and soul were controlled by four fluids, known as humors, and their balance directly influenced a person's health and temperament.
Melancholia comes from melaina kole, the word for black bile, the humor believed to cause sadness.
By changing your diet and through medical practices, you could bring your humors into balance.
Even though we now know much more about the systems that govern the human body, these Greek ideas about sadness resonate with current views, not on the sadness we all occasionally feel, but on clinical depression.
Doctors believe that certain kinds of long-term, unexplained emotional states are at least partially related to brain chemistry, the balance of various chemicals present inside the brain.
Like the Greek system, changing the balance of these chemicals can deeply alter how we respond to even extremely difficult circumstances.
There's also a long tradition of attempting to discern the value of sadness, and in that discussion, you'll find a strong argument that sadness is not only an inevitable part of life but an essential one.
If you've never felt melancholy, you've missed out on part of what it means to be human.
Many thinkers contend that melancholy is necessary in gaining wisdom.
Robert Burton, born in 1577, spent his life studying the causes and experience of sadness.
In his masterpiece "The Anatomy of Melancholy," Burton wrote, "He that increaseth wisdom increaseth sorrow."
The Romantic poets of the early 19th century believed melancholy allows us to more deeply understand other profound emotions, like beauty and joy.
To understand the sadness of the trees losing their leaves in the fall is to more fully understand the cycle of life that brings flowers in the spring.
But wisdom and emotional intelligence seem pretty high on the hierarchy of needs.
Does sadness have value on a more basic, tangible, maybe even evolutionary level?
Scientists think that crying and feeling withdrawn is what originally helped our ancestors secure social bonds and helped them get the support they needed.
Sadness, as opposed to anger or violence, was an expression of suffering that could immediately bring people closer to the suffering person, and this helped both the person and the larger community to thrive.
Perhaps sadness helped generate the unity we needed to survive, but many have wondered whether the suffering felt by others is anything like the suffering we experience ourselves.
The poet Emily Dickinson wrote, "I measure every Grief I meet With narrow, probing Eyes - I wonder if it weighs like MIne - Or has an Easier size."
And in the 20th century, medical anthropologists, like Arthur Kleinman, gathered evidence from the way people talk about pain to suggest that emotions aren't universal at all, and that culture, particularly the way we use language, can influence how we feel.
When we talk about heartbreak, the feeling of brokenness becomes part of our experience, where as in a culture that talks about a bruised heart, there actually seems to be a different subjective experience.
Some contemporary thinkers aren't interested in sadness' subjectivity versus universality, and would rather use technology to eliminate suffering in all its forms.
David Pearce has suggested that genetic engineering and other contemporary processes cannot only alter the way humans experience emotional and physical pain, but that world ecosystems ought to be redesigned so that animals don't suffer in the wild.
He calls his project "paradise engineering."
But is there something sad about a world without sadness?
Our cavemen ancestors and favorite poets might not want any part of such a paradise.
In fact, the only things about sadness that seem universally agreed upon are that it has been felt by most people throughout time, and that for thousands of years, one of the best ways we have to deal with this difficult emotion is to articulate it, to try to express what feels inexpressable.
In the words of Emily Dickinson, "'Hope' is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - "And sings the tune without the words - And never stops - at all -"
As a little girl, I always imagined I would one day run away.
From the age of six on, I kept a packed bag with some clothes and cans of food tucked away in the back of a closet.
There was a deep restlessness in me, a primal fear that I would fall prey to a life of routine and boredom.
And so, many of my early memories involved intricate daydreams where I would walk across borders, forage for berries, and meet all kinds of strange people living unconventional lives on the road.
Years have passed, but many of the adventures I fantasized about as a child -- traveling and weaving my way between worlds other than my own — have become realities through my work as a documentary photographer.
But no other experience has felt as true to my childhood dreams as living amongst and documenting the lives of fellow wanderers across the United States.
This is the nomadic dream, a different kind of American dream lived by young hobos, travelers, hitchhikers, vagrants and tramps.
In most of our minds, the vagabond is a creature from the past.
The word "hobo" conjures up an old black and white image of a weathered old man covered in coal, legs dangling out of a boxcar, but these photographs are in color, and they portray a community swirling across the country, fiercely alive and creatively free, seeing sides of America that no one else gets to see.
Like their predecessors, today's nomads travel the steel and asphalt arteries of the United States.
By day, they hop freight trains, stick out their thumbs, and ride the highways with anyone from truckers to soccer moms.
By night, they sleep beneath the stars, huddled together with their packs of dogs, cats and pet rats between their bodies.
Some travelers take to the road by choice, renouncing materialism, traditional jobs and university degrees in exchange for a glimmer of adventure.
Others come from the underbelly of society, never given a chance to mobilize upwards: foster care dropouts, teenage runaways escaping abuse and unforgiving homes.
Where others see stories of privation and economic failure, travelers view their own existence through the prism of liberation and freedom.
They'd rather live off of the excess of what they view as a wasteful consumer society than slave away at an unrealistic chance at the traditional American dream.
They take advantage of the fact that in the United States, up to 40 percent of all food ends up in the garbage by scavenging for perfectly good produce in dumpsters and trash cans.
They sacrifice material comforts in exchange for the space and the time to explore a creative interior, to dream, to read, to work on music, art and writing.
But there are many aspects to this life that are far from idyllic.
No one loses their inner demons by taking to the road.
Addiction is real, the elements are real, freight trains maim and kill, and anyone who has lived on the streets can attest to the exhaustive list of laws that criminalize homeless existence.
Who here knows that in many cities across the United States it is now illegal to sit on the sidewalk, to wrap oneself in a blanket, to sleep in your own car, to offer food to a stranger?
I know about these laws because I've watched as friends and other travelers were hauled off to jail or received citations for committing these so-called crimes.
Many of you might be wondering why anyone would choose a life like this, under the thumb of discriminatory laws, eating out of trash cans, sleeping under bridges, picking up seasonal jobs here and there.
The answer to such a question is as varied as the people that take to the road, but travelers often respond with a single word: freedom.
Until we live in a society where every human is assured dignity in their labor so that they can work to live well, not only work to survive, there will always be an element of those who seek the open road as a means of escape, of liberation and, of course, of rebellion.
Thank you.
(Applause)