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In Ongezellig, we are thrust into a world drained of myths, a world where the lives of Maya, Coco, and Mymy unfold in the shadows of a culture that has severed itself from the grandeur of the heroic, from the violent forces of transformation that alone could shake them from their lethargy. These characters, suspended in the banal routines of modern life, are exemplars of a society without myth—an age that clings to comfort and passivity rather than the ecstatic power of collective upheaval. Without a vision to mobilize them, they drift, unanchored, in a sea of shallow affections and half-hearted desires.

Maya, in her restless dissatisfaction, embodies the modern individual stripped of the energy of a unifying myth—a myth that could elevate her frustrations into a force that transcends the personal and becomes social, that transmutes individual discontent into collective strength. Her discontent is, in its current form, impotent; it lacks the virile power to shatter the structures of her everyday existence. She, like her companions, lacks the mythic vision that could convert her disillusionment into an active force. What could be a creative violence within her, the very drive that would compel her to break with the world of her discontent, has been stifled by a society that has reduced the individual to a cog, a passive consumer, a seeker of safety rather than a warrior for renewal.

Ongezellig lays bare the fatal flaw of a world without myth: it is a world without vigor, without the capacity for revolution in its truest form. The relationships between Maya, Coco, and Mymy are devoid of that transformative struggle that comes when individuals are bound by a shared vision, a shared dream, a cause that demands sacrifice and devotion. Instead, their relationships are marked by the small frictions of personal grievances, of fleeting quarrels and reconciliations that change nothing, that create no new form or higher unity. The absence of myth renders them powerless to shape their lives with the force of a great purpose, to break the boundaries of the ordinary and manifest the extraordinary.

What Ongezellig reveals is that a society stripped of myth is condemned to an endless cycle of stagnation—a cycle in which individuals like Maya, Coco, and Mymy search endlessly for meaning but lack the collective will to create it. They are prisoners of the bourgeois order, which pacifies them with comforts, disempowers them with cynicism, and deprives them of the mythic language that alone could inspire them to greatness. Without myth, they are bound to this world as it is, unable to envision a world as it could be.

In Ongezellig, then, we see the need for a new myth, a new vision potent enough to mobilize and transform the forces of discontent into a creative and revolutionary energy. Only by embracing a myth of struggle, a myth that values action and sacrifice over passivity and self-interest, can they overcome the inertia that keeps them bound to their present, listless state. Only through myth can they rediscover the power of collective action, the redemptive violence that alone can give birth to a new order.