There Goes My Hero
Or: If we want a better world, we have to stop binge watching supervillains.
Why do we spend so much of our limited free time talking about the successes and scandals of rich and powerful assholes?
I’m not talking about corporate news and entertainment. They’re owned by the rich and powerful assholes, so it’s no surprise we’ve got 500 channels covering the lives and times of 50 people. I’m talking about social media and independent content. The internet gives a platform to anyone who wants one, and what do we do? 50,000 blogs and streams covering the CEO and his C-suite side piece, the billionaire and his rocket ship romance, and the dead sex trafficker with an airplane named after a novel about the irresistible allure of tween booty.
We tell ourselves we hate these people. We mock their shoes, their surgeries, their weird little space cults. But we don’t hate them—not really. If we did, we’d look away. We wouldn’t spend hours watching, reacting, memeing, confessing in TikTok stitches that we’re obsessed. What we hate is how much we envy them. And not for their money. Not even for their power. What we envy is their detachment.
We don’t want to be them. We want to feel like they do—unbothered, uninvolved, immune. While the rest of us lie awake feeling helpless about climate, war, poverty, AI, pandemics, housing, healthcare—these people seem free. Not because they solved anything. But because they don’t seem to care. We stare at them because they’re what we think freedom looks like now: a person who doesn’t flinch.
He aims expressly at existence; though engaged in his undertaking, he is at the same time detached from the goal. Whether he succeeds or fails, he goes right ahead throwing himself into a new enterprise to which he will give himself with the same indifferent ardor.
That fantasy—the untouchable man who keeps going, keeps building, keeps taking—isn’t new. It’s just the latest reboot of something older, colder, and more seductive than we like to admit.
Simone de Beauvoir had a name for him: the adventurer.
She introduced him in The Ethics of Ambiguity, a book about freedom, meaning, and moral responsibility in a world without guarantees. It’s a clear-eyed look at what it means to act like a decent person when no god, law, or tradition is there to force you.
Beauvoir divides people into types. One of them is the serious man—someone who latches onto rigid systems to avoid facing the burden of freedom. He gives himself to a flag, a religion, a job title, a bottom line. He tells himself it’s not his choice. He’s just following orders.
The adventurer is his opposite. He knows there’s no higher authority. He sees that life has no meaning unless we create it. And instead of building anything meaningful—he bolts.
He acts for the thrill of acting. Fights for the thrill of fighting. Starts companies, wars, and cults with the same blank hunger. He’s not weighed down by doubt, principle, or people. He’s pure momentum.
We call it confidence. We call it drive. We sell it in TED Talks and startup culture and war movies and grindset memes. “It’s not personal.” “Sink or swim.” “Keep moving.” These are the platitudes we’ve come to call strength.
But if the adventurer feels nothing, why are we still watching him? What are we hoping to catch from someone who looks at the rest of us like background scenery?
Every undertaking unfolds in a human world and affects men. What distinguishes adventure from a simple game is that the adventurer does not limit himself to asserting his existence in solitary fashion. He asserts it in relationship to other existences. But he refuses responsibility for them. [...] He believes he can assert his own existence without taking into account that of others.
We’re not built for detachment.
Biologically, psychologically, spiritually—we’re social animals. We evolved to track one another’s faces, to mirror each other’s pain, to care what happens to the group. This isn’t some moral ideal we aspire to. It’s how we survive. Solidarity isn’t a virtue. It’s instinct.
But like every instinct, it has a breaking point. You can only care about so many people before the circuits start to fry.
This is the world we live in now: a world too big to hold in our heads. We scroll through suffering at a scale we can’t respond to. Every feed brings a new flood—burning forests, sinking cities, workers crushed under supply chains we benefit from. Every crisis is close enough to feel, but too far away to stop.
And so we break.
We disassociate. We numb out. We turn pain into content. We tell ourselves there’s nothing we can do. The more powerless we feel, the more we crave the illusion of immunity. The man who feels nothing starts to look like the only one who's still standing.
The adventurer gives us cover. He shows us how to keep going without caring. He treats others like scenery—like props in his story—and we find ourselves wanting to do the same. Not because we’re monsters, but because we’re exhausted. Because we’re scared. Because empathy without power turns into grief. And grief without meaning becomes unbearable.
If we can’t help, we want not to feel.
That’s the real danger of the adventurer—not just what he does, but what he makes look survivable.
Indifferent to the ends he sets up for himself, he is still more indifferent to the means of attaining them. He will treat them like instruments; he will destroy them if they get in his way. [...] Favorable circumstances are enough to transform the adventurer into a dictator. He carries the seed of one within him, since he regards mankind as indifferent matter destined to support the game of his existence.
We don’t just watch the adventurer. We clear the way for him. We make him a hero. We repost his slogans. We marvel at his detachment. We reward him with attention first, then capital, then votes. We say we want fairness, transparency, accountability—but what we reward is dominance. Speed. Scale. Results. And we don’t ask too many questions about how they’re achieved.
He doesn’t seize power. We hand it to him.
Because in a world this overwhelming, we don’t want someone who shares our fear. We want someone who seems immune to it. Someone who shrugs at suffering, bulldozes through complexity, and never once pauses to doubt himself. We call that leadership. We call that vision.
And so we build systems around the men who flinch the least.
Capitalism, in its current form, is a monument to this logic. It's built on the very indifference we crave, rewarding those who can coldly strip the earth, exploit labor, and externalize harm. So long as their profits soar, their adventuring wins. And we—the terrified, the exhausted, craving that same numb immunity—call it genius. The predictable result? The rest of us get lectures on bootstraps and the evils of avocado toast. Their extraction framed as our personal failure.
Authoritarianism—or our modern pseudo-democracy—works the same way. The strongman promises safety, then crushes everything that feels like a threat to his detached control. Artists, teachers, workers, mothers, dissidents—anyone whose freedom isn’t instrumental to their story gets swept aside. We don’t just allow it. We applaud it. Because our fear-driven hunger for immunity has trained us to dread the consequences of empathy far more than the iron fist of control. And again, the result is always more suffering, more injustice, more of us left behind, while the adventurers rake it in, completely unbothered.
This is how the adventurer becomes the dictator.
It doesn’t take a coup. It just takes enough people desperate to feel less—and willing to sacrifice everything that makes life human in exchange.
And the irony? The more power he’s given, the less human he becomes.
[The adventurer] falls, with a pretext of independence, into the servitude of the object. [...] Two attitudes are possible. He can remain indifferent to the content of his actions, sacrificing others to his own will for power. Or he can become conscious of the real requirements of his own freedom, which can will itself only by destining itself to an open future, by seeking to extend itself by means of the freedom of others. [...] The man whose end is the liberation of himself and others, who forces himself to respect this end through the means which he uses to attain it, no longer deserves the name of adventurer. One is then in the presence of a genuinely free man.
The people we watch and fear and serve—our billionaires, our strongmen, our alpha-dog CEOs—they aren’t free. They’re slaves to performance. Slaves to conquest. Slaves to a hollow version of freedom that depends on the suffering of others to feel real. They are adventurers, yes—but only in the tragic sense: always moving, always hungry, always alone.
They're not leading us anywhere worth going. And honestly, they're too busy chasing their own tails to care. Their supposed strength is just a desperate flailing, a performance for the masses they need to feel real. We don’t need more of them.
What we need are new heroes. The kind Beauvoir points to—not immune from feeling, but alive inside it. Not detached from others, but bound to them. People who fight for their own liberation through the liberation of others. That’s the kind of freedom that doesn’t turn into tyranny. It expands. It deepens. It holds.
If that’s who we need, then that’s who we have to become. It starts with a simple, revolutionary act: starve the asshats of your attention. Turn off the supervillain reality show. Stop feeding your precious time, outrage, and fascination to those who only take. They thrive on the energy we give them. It's time we cut off their supply.
Instead, direct that attention—that powerful, world-shaping energy—to those who embody genuine freedom. To those that build for others’ sake as well as their own, the persistent advocates, the ones who feel deeply and act with intention. We each have to aspire to become that genuinely free person, recognizing that freedom is a team sport.
This means choosing, every single day, to walk a harder path. A path that demands we hold care without clinging to outcomes, that cultivates compassion without aversion to uncomfortable truths. We have to set aside our fear without abandoning our core concern for the world—and without flipping our lid in reactive anger. This isn't about becoming numb; it's about becoming truly present.
We don’t have to flinch from the pain of the world. But we do have to feel.
That’s where real freedom begins.
And real freedom is the only kind that lasts.