As a writer and editor who’s been fortunate to be gainfully employed in various capacities for nearly a decade now, I understand all too well the importance and power of narratives. They shape our understanding of the world and our place in it. In many ways, the boundaries of our world are shaped by the stories we are told and tell ourselves.

My lifelong interest in folklore and the paranormal stems from my love of storytelling and narrative journeys. The idea that one can encounter the same monsters and oddities in real life as found in the storybooks I read was endlessly intriguing to me as a child.

Today, I continue to be fascinated by the idea. What’s changed is that I’m less interested in the creatures people encounter and more interested in the effects anomalous events have on an experiencer’s life. In writer-jargon, I see these events as inciting incidents that set off or profoundly alter the plot of a person’s life.

In the wake of my last newsletter addressing “Observer” columnist Martha Gill’s piece, “Not quite religion, not quite self-help: welcome to the Jordan Peterson age of nonsense,” I felt it fitting to revisit an old idea of mine. While Gill views people’s interest in the supernatural as a negative, I see it as full of potential.

Beyond Boundaries

For those who have read my essay “Hypernormalisation and the Paranormal Media Trap,” some of the following will be a retread. For those that haven’t, I’ll sum up the essay’s thesis here:

Many people unknowingly place boundaries on their reality, shaped by cultural upbringing and a world dominated by capitalist principles, limiting what they perceive as possible or achievable. This impedes their ability to imagine solutions to major issues stemming from late-stage capitalism, like climate change or the rise of authoritarianism. The paranormal, with its reality-shattering experiences, pushes people beyond these boundaries. Evidence for this can be found in the reports from people who experience extraordinary events — such as near-death experiences, close encounters and the like — finding themselves more invested in nature, the well-being of others and additional egalitarian pursuits afterward. These shifts in perspective not only transform individuals but also hold the potential to challenge and reshape soceity’s collective values.

For more evidence, read my full 6,136-word essay linked above — or turn to Reddit, where shades of this thesis have played out in real time.

Hoping for the Extraordinary

Propelled by the surge of mysterious drone sightings, a now deleted post on Reddit’s r/Aliens recently asked, “Is everyone just secretly hoping for an alien invasion so we don’t have to work again? Lol”

With nearly 15,000 upvotes, over 1,800 comments and more than 2,000 shares, the answer is a resounding yes — people are longing for an alien invasion to change their lives. In the words of my thesis, they’re yearning for an extraordinary event to push them beyond the boundaries in which they feel trapped.

But don’t take my word for it, let’s go to the comment section:

Despite the barbs thrown at them by myself and others, these sentiments are why I’ve always held a soft spot for this particular segment of the nuts-and-bolts disclosure crowd. All they really want is alien tech to provide them with free energy and automate the workforce to their benefit. Is it delusional? Sure — but their hearts are in the right place for the most part.

Of course, people desperate enough to pin their hopes on space technology often fall victim to an endless slew of grifters, bad actors and opportunists who exploit their beliefs for personal gain. It would be disheartening enough if only money were being taken by con artists, but the paranormal space is also rife with bad-faith political dealings that make the issue far more troubling.

While this is undeniably problematic, it also highlights the profound power of these topics to inspire and reshape our understanding of the world. Their potential to break boundaries and reimagine possibilities makes them both deeply significant as cultural touchstones but also ripe for exploitation.

Plot Lines

When we consider some of the cultural war touchpoints of recent memory, the manipulation of folklore and the paranormal is unique in that it often targets foundational narratives rather than surface-level aspects. Take for example movie franchises that people complain have been ruined by going “woke.” Their arguments are rooted in a perceived contemporary phenomenon affecting the franchises they love.

When it comes to the paranormal and folkloric, they’re attacked at the root. We can see this at play with ideas like Lemuria or the upswell of interest in the Tartarian conspiracy theory in recent years. Both of these ideas attempt to revise our entire understanding of human history and society, often to the benefit of white supremacist worldviews.

I even find this happening close to home. In Wisconsin, some have attempted to claim that the state’s Native American effigy mounds were built by a foreign race. This narrative has become such an issue that the University of Wisconsin-Madison addresses it directly on their website:

“In a general sense, Indian oral tradition and archaeological research has confirmed that the ancient mounds found throughout Wisconsin were built by Indian peoples. Although this may seem like common sense, it was not long ago that some people believed that the mounds found throughout Wisconsin were made by a vanished race of ‘Mound Builders’ who were thought to be any one of a number of non-Indian people including the ‘Ten Lost Tribes of Israel,’ Vikings, Britons, Hindus and many others. We now know this to be false and sometimes the product of racist views. After more than 165 years of archaeological research there has not been any evidence to suggest that anyone other than Indian peoples built the mounds.”

And it’s not merely ancient history that is being attacked. The post-2017 shift from UFO to UAP, with the former’s history being all but entirely discarded with the change, demonstrates that if the root of one of these topics can’t be manipulated, the whole subject will be rebooted.

These stories are too great to let go of.

Controlling the Narrative

While these experiences may shatter boundaries, they leave individuals with countless directions to explore once they’ve been pushed beyond their familiar reality. Encounters with the supernatural are profoundly personal and usually offer no guidance through the sudden disruption of consensus reality they bring.

Much like psychedelic experiences, the event itself matters less than how a person integrates the experience into their life afterward.

In my essay linked above, I outline the concept of hypernormalisation, which can be briefly described as the persistent maintenance of a broken status quo, even when its dysfunction has become the norm and is widely recognized. What keeps this in place is peoples’ inability to imagine an alternative — they are confined by the boundaries of their own making.

This same dynamic applies to how people process the anomalous. When a pre-formed narrative about the extraordinary already exists, it shapes how individuals interpret their own experiences. Instead of breaking down boundaries, these experiences then reinforce them, fitting the extraordinary into familiar, limiting worldviews.

Yet when free of cultural baggage, these extraordinary events seem to break down barriers in the direction most needed to progress society — environmental, humanitarian and more. As the cited Reddit post demonstrates, people are ready and eager for those changes to happen via the extraordinary.

What they fail to see is that progress doesn’t require a worldwide extraordinary event. If you believe the world contains supernatural elements, your boundaries have already expanded beyond the materialist status quo. You’re further past the threshold than you may realize.

If your worldview includes alien saviors, life beyond death, fairies, or other paranormal realities, then healing the planet, ending homelessness, and similar goals should already fall well within your belief system. It’s easier to create a system guaranteeing healthcare for all than to fight for the government to disclose alien technology — yet people often pursue the seemingly impossible while dismissing the practical as unattainable.

The extraordinary change we seek doesn’t lie in waiting for otherworldly forces but in rewriting the everyday narratives that define our lives and our world. Real transformation begins when we recognize that we are already capable of being our own extraordinary force.