Storytelling as a balm for cultural collapse

Saturday, I wrote about the cultural free fall we’re in: how context is collapsing, language is unravelling, and meaning itself is dissolving in front of our freaking eyes.

That’s the environment brands are trying to speak into right now—a noisy, contradictory, nihilistic churn. It’s literally like screaming into the void. We have officially reached void status.

Which is why, I believe, it might be time to revisit the oldest trick in the human playbook. Once upon a time, a much quieter time, we sat around fires and told stories, stories that spanned generations through the medium of myth.

When the world goes unnatural, when technology races ahead of our ability to process it, we return to what we know best. Stories. Myths. Philosophies.

The primal frameworks we used, long before Wi-Fi and algorithms, to make sense of chaos.

Myths were humanity’s first meaning-making devices. They explained the stars, justified rituals, mapped morality. Their purpose was not only to entertain but to orient people inside the unknown. And even now, they still do.

Because marketing itself has always borrowed from myth.

We don’t often say it out loud, but brands have always been myth-makers.

• The Hero’s Journey is everywhere in advertising. The customer has a problem, the brand guides them, the story resolves with triumph. Yaaaay.

• Archetypes dominate brand positioning. The rebel, the caregiver, the ruler, the joker.

• Every startup writes an origin myth. A eureka moment in a garage, an underdog taking on giants, a promise to “change the world.”

This isn’t a coincidence. Marketing’s job has always been to give people stories they can see themselves in. It’s mythmaking, but make it commerce.

As I said in my last article, there’s a very real danger for brands right now in becoming nothing more than cultural noise—a quick dopamine hit in the feed, forgotten before the next scroll or swipe.

But if we take mythmaking seriously, I believe there’s a bigger role available. One where brands don’t only tell their own stories, but they anchor the conversations that actually shape society.

Myth is communal, shared across fires, temples, marketplaces.

The power is not in the story itself, but in how those stories became scaffolding for dialogue, identity, and shared meaning.

Brands have the same opportunity. Done right, a brand story can become a stimulus for conversation, debate, and even collective imagination. It can set the stage for people to build ideas around, not just consume passively.

Patagonia’s activism around climate change isn’t just marketing; it anchors a cultural conversation about responsibility. Lego cultivates creativity as a social practice. Even Liquid Death, silly as it may seem, turned “canned water” into a rebellion myth that people riff on together.

In today’s cultural context where language melts into nonsense, trends burn out in 24 hours, and nothing feels solid, myth offers something radical: coherence.

A narrative arc. A sense that the world (or at least one tiny part of it) makes sense.

That doesn’t mean brands need to start writing literal fables. It means grounding their work in the deeper structures humans are wired for:

• Tensions that feel real

• Characters we can root for

• Stories that offer resolution, hope, or clarity when everything else feels chaotic

The opportunity here?

I know the temptation right now is to join the churn.

To meme, to vibe, to dissolve into the nonsense just to feel relevant. But there’s another path: build stories people actually want to return to. Offer something durable. Speak plainly. Create campaigns with arcs, not just moments.

Because when culture is collapsing into fragments, myth is more than marketing: it’s a balm. It’s a reminder that even in chaos, there are stories worth holding onto.

-Sophie Randell, Writer