Imagine back to a Friday night in 1989. You and your friends have just rented a copy of Rocky IV on VHS from Blockbuster for the umpteenth time. Can you remember the feeling you had when Rocky was training in the snow, outrunning the KGB agents up a mountain, and overhead-pressing a wooden carriage? You weren’t rolling your eyes. You weren’t deconstructing the geopolitical narratives about who the real “evil empire” was during the Cold War with the Soviets. When the synth melody in John Cafferty’s “Heart’s on Fire” drops just as that Rocky training montage starts, you could feel your heart on fire.
If you were born after 1990, it might be impossible to imagine that people actually felt that way. That kind of earnestness fell out of fashion during the “break-stuff years” of the late 90’s and into the 2000s. If the only loss were the unironic action-movie hero, it might have been tolerable, but the change in culture touched so much more. It changed everything.
Rocky defeated Ivan Drago, the Berlin Wall fell, and we had defeated the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union. When the Cold War ended, it was like the binary good-versus-evil narrative that defined post–World War II American culture had collapsed. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously called it “the end of history.” The good guys won and the story had ended, so why weren’t we living in our promised utopia?
The sense that the story previous generations had given us was a lie became pervasive. The first generation raised entirely on TV (Gen X) had come of age. They had consumed more advertisements over the course of their life than any prior generation, and they had the sneaking suspicion that those stories about good guys and bad guys, objective truth, and even religion were just one big commercial trying to sell you something. Irony and cynicism were the defense mechanisms against being sold to.
Postmodernism was now in the mainstream.
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement that questions objective truths, claims of universal values, and ultimate guiding stories, emphasizing instead the subjective, fragmented, and socially constructed nature of reality. Its inclination toward challenging authority, tradition, and any idea of a single, overarching meaning or truth began brewing in academic circles in the mid-twentieth century, but it hadn’t truly hit the pop-culture zeitgeist until the 1990s.
As I explain in greater detail in chapter 5 of Based on a True Story, the postmodern claim— that all overarching, guiding stories are attempts to maintain or secure power and are deserving of critique and deconstruction— acted like a sledgehammer, tearing down the values, traditions, and assumptions of the past.
It would not be a historical anomaly for the traditions of one generation to be critiqued by the next. In fact, the nineteenth-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel argued that this is how the zeitgeist, the “spirit of the age,” shifts, but what happened in the 1990s and at the turn of the millennium was different. Mass media and the internet had no historical comparison.
These innovations amplified a shift in the “spirit of the age” to a degree we still cannot fully comprehend. The first mechanized printing press, developed by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440, enabled the mass production of books and other printed materials. The effect of this innovation produced the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the Enlightenment. Shouldn’t we expect the impact of mass media and the internet to be even more profound?
And what happens when an ideology that calls you to question everything gets disseminated to the masses on a scale unlike anything the world has ever seen before?
Enslaving Liberation
The award- winning novelist David Foster Wallace was arguably the greatest author of Generation X. Wallace saw how the postmodern zeitgeist shift had been brewing for decades in hipster high culture, and in the late 1990s— as he grew exhausted with its emptiness— foretold its inevitable end. He believed that postmodernism’s propensity to destroy the stories that had come before made it “patricidal” and would produce a generation that felt enslaved to cynicism. “Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving,” wrote Wallace a little over ten years before he tragically took his own life.
What would it mean for us to kill the stories, values, and traditions of our fathers? What would life as a story orphan feel like? Could you even navigate life without a guiding story that you believed was true?
These were the kinds of questions Wallace personally wrestled with until the very end. He instinctively understood that there was a connection between the stories we believe to be true about the world and that old religious notion of worship. In a 2005 commencement address, Wallace warned that you cannot live without a story that guides your life, and you cannot live without worshipping something:
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual- type thing to worship . . . is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
You Live in a Story
If we are to make sense of the meaning crisis and find our way out together, we must understand the power of story in shaping our souls. We must understand that sitting in a crowded movie theater, turning on the TV or Netflix, or picking up an imaginative sci- fi paperback has never been merely entertainment. Look at the online vitriol that breaks out when the Star Wars franchise makes a controversial story decision. Go to a comic con and observe the thousands of people cosplaying the archetypal heroes that most inspire them. Look at the budget for each summer’s top box-office Hollywood hits.
This is not merely entertainment akin to playing a game of checkers or riding on a roller coaster. These are our guiding stories, our modern myths, and they are central to our process of finding and making meaning out of our experiences of the world.
Humans are storied creatures. Unlike any other species in creation, we possess an insatiable appetite to find meaning in life. And yet we aren’t born into the world with answers to why we are here and what purpose, if any, there is to our existence. So each generation, across all times and all cultures, passes on to their children what they believe is most sacred and meaningful, not by handing them spreadsheets filled with scientific data but by telling them stories.
From ancient biblical stories to modern tales of heroism that fill the pages of comic books, these guiding stories become our navigational system for finding our place in life. When we tuck our kids into bed at night and want to pass on some morsel of wisdom, we tell stories.
When we honor our dead at funerals, we tell stories. When we are working through a point of pain in our lives on the therapist’s couch, we tell stories.
In every decision you’ve ever made about a career, a spouse, or where you will live, you’ve imagined a possible story. How we navigate each day is shaped by the story we believe is true.
So what happens to our souls under the constant consumption of subversive, deconstructive stories? What changes in us when the stories of our formative years consistently portray the cynic as the ideal? What becomes of a people who have been told their entire lives that all guiding stories simply mask a play for power?
A fundamental disposition of cynicism forms within their souls.
For an entire generation raised in the wake of that anti-story, with no remembrance of a time in culture when one could sit in a theater and watch an unironically sincere Rocky IV without a tinge of cynical skepticism or suspicion of sincerity, irony became our native tongue. We subverted our fairy tales, killed Superman, and abandoned the religious faith of our parents and grandparents.
Make no mistake: these are all related. To those who have lived as story orphans, ironic critique is no longer experienced as liberation but as demoralizing enslavement. Sitting now in the rubble of all that we have dismantled, many are wondering, “How did we get here? Where do we go from here?”
The Search for a Better Story
We cannot live in a vacuum of story. It’s not sustainable. As a result, something has begun to shift in American culture as we move through the 2020s. We’re slowly allowing ourselves to hope that there may be a guiding story we can inhabit that affirms truth, goodness, and beauty once again.
Maybe we can feel something sincere or even something wholesome again?
Critically acclaimed films, streaming series, and even commercials are starting to break free from the grip of cynicism and reject the libertine tendency to dissolve all our ties to tradition. What did you feel when you stepped out of the theater after watching Top Gun: Maverick (2022)? How did you feel watching the sincerity and earnestness of a new, brightly clad Superman (2025) juxtaposed against a world still stuck in the cynicism of the past?
Doesn’t the aspirational and hopeful feeling you get when you watch those stories give you the sensation of catching your first breath of air after being held underwater for far too long? Maybe sincerity really is the new punk rock.
Is it too far-fetched to think that this hopeful feeling welling up might nudge you back toward church or toward being a person who shoulders a weight of moral responsibility in the community? As you can see if you continue to read the rest of Based on a True Story, there are plenty of philosophical, theological, and scientific reasons to believe that this is exactly what consuming these stories does to us.
Rumbling beneath the surface of our cultural zeitgeist, this shift has already begun; the spirit of our age is changing. We finally saw enough of what that final scene of Fight Club warned about when The Pixies sang over the cinematic shots of chaotic destruction, “Your head will collapse, but there’s nothing in it.”
We have felt that collapse in American culture, and we are done with living in ruin. We’re ready to build something good and grow something beautiful. We want a new language beyond our cynicism. The signs of a new seismic cultural and spiritual shift toward sincerity and hope are dawning on the horizon.
This essay is excerpted with permission from Paul Anleitner’s new book, “Based on a True Story: Vibe Shifts, the End of Deconstruction, and the Reboot of Meaning,” which is available to order here.
