Is "The Nothing" taking over our creativity?

1984 Limahl's worldwide hit song "The Neverending Story", that became the main theme of this beautiful movie based on Michael Ende's book, started doing, right from its first verse, a huge spoiler of the core of the movie's plot:

Turn around, look at what you see. In her face, the mirror of your dreams.

The moment in which the young warrior, Atreyu, looks at the mirror in the second gate of the Southern Oracle is, in the words of his last mentor Engywook the gnome, the hardest part of the journey, the moment in which a man looks deep into himself and discovers the greed into the apparent kindness, and the cowardice into the apparent courage.

This is the most intense part of Atreyu's journey and, in general, of any Hero's Journey. The Abyss (death and rebirth). The moment in which the hero confronts his own self, overcomes it and becomes a renovated, empowered self.

What Atreyu sees in the mirror is surprising for both sides of the mirror: Atreyu represents the brave hero that Bastian wants to be. Bastian represents the fear that is preventing Atreyu from fulfilling his mission (he needs a human child to give the Empress a new name). Both characters, Bastian and Atreyu, are the same, each one on their side of the mirror, in their world. And both worlds, reality and fantasia, the external/common world and the inner/unknown/extraordinary world, are beautifully related in this scene of the movie.

For the majority of the "heroes", this stage of the journey was a terrible test as it forced them to confront them to their inner, true self that didn't shine as their surface. But for some HEROES, like this 11-year motherless school-bullied child with pure heart that has found in reading books a whole world of fantasia, the mirror is, as Limahl's song said, the door to their dreams, to be who they dream to be.

Bastian gets over his fears (the school bullying guys calling him a coward, his father reminding him that he needs to stay with his feet on the ground and even his mother's death), opens the window in the storm and shouts his mother's name, "Moon Child", as his given name to the Empress and thus saves Fantasia.

Actually... he saves himself:

• "The Nothing" is the representation of the loss of hopes and dreams by the humankind. Just as Bastian's personal mourning after his mother's death, losing the interest and joy for school, activities and anything in real life.
• Fantasia is the world created by human imagination. The extraordinary world. The world of creativity. The world of arts. The world of books. The world that has kept Bastian sane when everything in the ordinary world fell apart.
• Bastian was in a dead end in the real world. But in Fantasia he confronted his fears, let his creativity fly, trusted himself and resurrected to a new life. One in which he can change his reality, confront the bullies at school, tell his father that he needs to cry to his mom because not everything in life is obligations and successes, and keep on imagining a better world through the power of reading.

Bastian's journey represents that of many leaders today. A reality that is full of anxiety for short-term results, pressure for surface success, stress for urgent obligations, and no time to stop, think, feel, imagine, enjoy and create. No time to be humans.

We live in the era of the Artificial Intelligence, the era in which we humans are supposed to evolve for more creative jobs, live a more balanced life and collaborate with each other to build a better world. But I wonder if we are letting "The Nothing" take over our creativity and making ourselves even more artificial, in the way we lead ourselves and others. How many "heroes" and HEROES are there in the book.

I guess that is another story.