Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

This is the same story told from a different perspective.

So what do you confront in your life?

Well, a monstrous, eternal, infinite mess of multi-headed snakes.

Tell me that's never happened in your life.

You wake up in the morning and think, oh my God, I wish I was asleep.

Snakes everywhere.

Right.

So what does the hero do?

Confronts the snake.

More than that, this is even implicit still in the biblical corpus.

There are echoes of the representation of God as the primordial deity who slayed the serpent that existed at the beginning of time and made the world out of its pieces.

Leviathan.

What does that mean?

Well, it means that we're hunters.

It means that we make our clothes out of animal skins.

It means that we establish the order that is habitable by confronting the predators and making use of them, taming them, or destroying them.

We establish order as a consequence of a conflict with potential.

It's echoed in the story of the dragon and the gold.

You confront what's terrifying and possible, and you gain what's valuable and necessary.

And that's the eternal story of the heroic element of the human spirit.