Myth seems to come together after a series of repetitions and accumulations of experiences within a given era, where it is arrived at and transmitted through storytelling, media, and other aspects of culture. Within the present, it is difficult to predict exactly what will happen, but as one periodically turns away from immediacy and contemplates myth, it informs one's expectations and the formation of one's own personal ends, which can be worked towards and strived for in the present. Before myth then is simple doing, after whatever myth that was formed before dies of course.
Part of the difficulty of this era is the mismatch between myth and reality, and that slow and painful realignment that occurs to account for such a mismatch. Yes the best pieces of contemporary media are quite pessimistic and dark, but you really only see those as exercises of the imagination, and as pieces of reassurance that one isn't alone, or what one is experiencing is a larger phenomenon. But on the national and international stage, and with anything that has anything to do with actually doing something or affecting change, it all refers back to an idea of rising to some sort of challenge and overcoming it.
Pessimism and perpetual crisis are tough sells. It is difficult to market with them, or conduct politics with them, even for the right. However bleak Trump's world vision was during the campaign, there was still an overriding message that whatever humiliations and degradations were being suffered would eventually be overcome.
There isn't a myth formed yet that speaks of catastrophe and tragedy, and informs one's navigation of the interim and the aftermath, at least a myth that is contemporary and relatable, and thus actionable. Something like Christianity has the elements in place, but its temporal and historical distance has altered it beyond recognition to the contemporary experience, and besides, it has been wildly distorted through historical corruptions of power and the like, which is altogether apart from its mere semantic drift.
Without an appropriate collective myth, the default instinct is to sift through whatever artifacts of previous myth still cohere, say by finding them frozen in stone, ink, or electronic current. The dissolution of these elements occur slower than the organic formations that instantiated them, and so they lead to a deception not unlike the final rays of light emitted by a dead star.
The alternative is to simply do and experience and witness and learn. And another more harmonious myth gradually takes shape once again.
