I thought this essay was generally very good. I liked it a lot; as someone who is rather tunnel-vision about my work, the idea that maximizing yourself for efficiency like a machine is perhaps beside the point of how we are actually made is a nice "cold water" sort of reminder:

Also really aligns with Henri Bergon's theories for the social purpose of laughter, which is funny; out of every philosopher who's had something to say about laughter, Bergson's work actually has the most profound impact on comedy as we know it today.

Basically, he argues that what's funny about the man who slips on a banana peel is that he's walking so much like a machine that he can't help but slip: We need to make fun of each other to avoid become machine-like because it's not conducive to (his/"the") ideal of society and human behavior.

If you do a little digging, you can appreciate his historical context makes him a little anti-machine and anti-technology, which is why I can get a little skeptical of point-blank accepting his theory - but the mind is at least not exactly a machine that all of us know completely how to operate, so it's salient to remind ourselves to reassess our operations every now and then.

To modify the face description of the linear and non-linear approaches to suit some of my perception of life: It's like looking at a yoga pose and trying to achieve the shape of the pose via cranking yourself rather than learning how to understand how the body moves in a genuine sense. Which is to say I don't think it actually works.

I think the overarching, singular sort of meaning he describes can be found in the mysteries which obsess you. I don't think that it's something you can rationalize and plan out and say "Ah, Eureka, I'm supposed to be a ______!"; I think it is inherently a highly intuitive, emotional and spiritual "breadcrumb trail" experience. Which is why the description of the nonlinear approach is compelling.

I think "why" we consider the idea of a linear approach viable is exacerbated by the telephone game of how stories evolve over time: the people who retell the stories can get preoccupied with how the hero saved other people, rather than who the hero needed to be in order to be a hero. It may reveal the possibility that we value the potentiality that a hero who will save us exists over the potentiality of us becoming the heroes ourselves - or that we value being seen as a hero over the work required to be a hero. Or -- that we are simply taught those values due to inadvertently sloppy second-hand storytelling :) (I tend to believe that it's this last option - we just get confused by poor second-hand storytelling)

I say "can" and "may" because I think there are a lot of very sober authors throughout all of time who emphasize describing virtuous action over the social effects of the perception of heroism. Not just Ayn Rand!