This new body of work is a meditation on the historical functions of folklore and mythology. It is an inquiry into these mechanisms relative to the cultural paradigm shift of the meta-modern age.

How the disappearance of folk tales is reshaping the inner lives of generations

Once, stories were how we learned to live—within ourselves and among others. Folk tales, simple yet strange, passed down by voice and firelight, carried more than wonder. They offered a quiet education in how to be human. A hero’s journey through danger was also a lesson in restraint, courage, and empathy. The monsters were never just monsters; they were metaphors for greed, cruelty, or pride. And when the story ended, the triumph was rarely about victory—it was about understanding. The child who listened and shivered learned something wordless but enduring: the darkness outside me is also inside me, and what I do with it matters, not only for me but for everyone I touch.

That slow apprenticeship in morality has thinned. The communal fire has become the solitary glow of the screen. Our myths now arrive in fragments—thirty seconds long, looping endlessly, designed for reaction rather than reflection. Once, stories prepared us to face the unknown and to live responsibly within a shared world. Now, the feed teaches us to curate the self. Young people grow fluent in expression but poor in introspection, building identity not from imagination or shared meaning, but from visibility.

Without shared myths, our inner worlds drift apart. Empathy flattens when every narrative must compete for attention. Moral complexity collapses into outrage or irony. The great symbolic journeys that once gave shape to emotion—the exile, the transformation, the return—have been replaced by endless performance. Suffering no longer leads to understanding; it becomes content. The quiet education of the heart—the idea that virtue is relational, that meaning is found between people—starts to erode.

The loss is easy to overlook but hard to repair. A culture without folk tales still tells stories, but they no longer bind us together; they scatter us into private mythologies of the self. What disappears isn’t imagination itself, but its purpose—the belief that stories exist not only to entertain, but to instruct, to remind us of our shared obligations and the moral order that makes community possible.

Perhaps new myths will still rise from the digital murk—hybrid tales shaped by code and collective fear, by longing for connection in a world of distraction. But for now, we live in a kind of mythic silence between worlds: the old stories fading, the new ones not yet wise. And in that pause, the human psyche waits, listening for someone, somewhere, to begin again, softly and seriously: Once upon a time.

Why Folk Tales Matter

Folk tales are a culture’s moral bloodstream. They transmit values through narrative, not decree—teaching that choices have consequences, that compassion sustains order, that courage renews the world. In their repetition, they reinforce the social contract: the shared belief that our fates are intertwined. Beneath their simplicity, they carry acts of quiet resistance—dreams of fairness, justice imagined in humble language. Told aloud, they build empathy; retold, they evolve alongside the people who need them. They educate, console, and connect. And in reminding us who we are, they remind us what we owe to one another.