Apology of the Mythomaniac
- Sombrero
- Mar 19
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 4
What a Wonderful Disease Mythomania Is!
Mythomaniac (n.)—A person afflicted with mythomania, prone to fabricating stories, giving life to the creations of their imagination, often living in a fictional reality and attempting to impose it on others as truth. Commonly used to describe a deceiver, an impostor, or a megalomaniac.
This is the definition of "mythomaniac" according to the dictionary, which is now outdated in the face of contemporary times.
It is time for today’s youth to rediscover the true beauty of mythomania—the deeper kind, the one bold enough to distort reality.
Modern society is a shattered mirror, where the fragments of our reflection scatter us into a thousand refractions: there are no more truths, no more promises, no horizon left to conquer. Everything is relative. Every ideal has been deconstructed and dismantled into a pile of rubble.
But beneath this rubble, youth is suffocating.
We have been taught to distrust myths, dismantle illusions, and expose the lies that once upheld the world. But without myths, without illusions, all that remains is nothingness.
We live in an era that no longer asks us to believe in something—it only asks us to consume, adapt, and participate in an endless shadow play that strips us of meaning, leaving us with just one certainty: insignificance.
Youth, once ablaze with ideals and titanic desires, now withers under the unbearable weight of a world that promises nothing but demands everything. And yet, perhaps, to escape this condition, we need only embrace a concept—one so audacious it borders on scandalous: mythomania.
Yes, not as pathological deceit, but rather as a will to believe, to invent, to become more than what we are. Like Don Quixote, who rides not to fight windmills, but to remind the world that windmills can be giants, that reality is no more "real" than what we decide to make of it.
In today’s postmodern condition, young people do not lack freedom—but they use it to define and imprison themselves, reducing themselves to mere objects rather than affirming themselves as subjects.
A young consultant who performs his role with the rigidity of an automaton is merely a man fleeing from his truth. But this is precisely where the mythomaniac finds his redemption: while the consultant deceives himself out of fear, the mythomaniac does so out of courage.
The mythomaniac does not deny their freedom—they shape it, forcing it to become a myth.
They do not play at being something else to escape what they are; the mythomaniac invents a grander self—not to flee from reality, but to distort it.
The mythomaniac is, therefore, a nihilist overcome—one who has stared into the void of the world and decided to fill it with their imagination.
In an age that idolizes sterile realism and mocks dreams, the mythomaniac is a rebel.
Like a modern Sisyphus, they take the boulder of their fate and turn it into a throne.
To rediscover mythomania means restoring youth’s right to excess, to delirium, to greatness.
This is not a call to escape—but an invitation to rewrite the rules, to turn life from mere survival into a work of art.
It is the audacity to shout at the sky that the stars are ours, that reality will never define us, because we are the myth we create.
So, young spirits, embrace your delirium—not as madness, but as liberation.
Be mythomaniacs, not to hide, but to exist.
Because, in the end, what is mythomania, if not the hope of greatness long denied?
APOLOGY OF THE MYTHOMANIAC
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