What Superman Left Blank
- 1 day ago
- 9 min read
Aran Bray is the creator of The Take One Moment Method (TOM), a practical approach to human behaviour that focuses on the moment before action. His work helps people recognise patterns, interrupt automatic responses, and develop real self-direction.
I was about seven years old when I discovered my dad wasn't the strongest man in the world. Christopher Reeve was. I saw Superman at the cinema, and I was completely captivated. You have to remember that I was a child of the 1970s. We had three television channels, eventually four. Children's programmes appeared for a short window around school hours, the news came on a couple of times a day, and if you wanted to know what had happened in the world, you often waited until tomorrow's newspaper arrived. There simply wasn't very much coming at you. Then Superman flew across a cinema screen.
My dad had some competition
Until then, my dad was the strongest man I knew. Then this impossibly handsome bloke appeared who could lift cars, fly through the air, fire lasers from his eyes, and seemingly blow a tornado across the room.
Around the same time, I discovered Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk. Lou Ferrigno played the Hulk, and to a young boy who knew nothing about bodybuilding, Pumping Iron, or Arnold Schwarzenegger, the sheer size of this actual human being was almost impossible to comprehend.
But looking back, something else strikes me about those characters. For all their strength, they were remarkably gentle. Even the Hulk didn't go around looking for people to hurt. He became dangerous when something threatened someone else. Cars were lifted, walls were smashed, and enormous strength was unleashed, but usually in the service of saving somebody.
It was masculine strength used for the betterment of humanity. Superman seemed to amplify everything my dad had been trying to teach me about what being a man meant. Be strong, certainly, but use your strength well. Look. Listen. Help when it's appropriate. Be kind without needing applause for it. The older I get, the more I realise how much that little boy absorbed.
Superman wore glasses, and nobody noticed
There was something wonderfully ridiculous about Clark Kent. He was Superman wearing glasses. Same face. Same body. Same man. Yet somehow nobody noticed.
As a child, I accepted it because that was the story. Looking back, I think there was something rather clever happening beneath it. Clark didn't just change his clothes. He shrank his presence. He became awkward, humble, gentle, and slightly unsure of himself. He occupied less space. People were kind to Clark, but they rarely seemed overwhelmed by him.
Superman was different. He stood differently. Spoke differently. Occupied the space available to him without apology. Yet he didn't use that presence to make everyone else smaller. Quite the opposite.
Lois Lane was already formidable. She was a woman succeeding in what was portrayed as a very male world, ambitious, assertive, capable, and quite prepared to fight for her place in it. Yet around Superman, we were allowed to see something else in her. She softened. There was wonder, vulnerability, and playfulness.
Jimmy Olsen changed around him too. The young, slightly uncertain photographer gradually became more willing to step forward into the world. Even Gene Hackman's gloriously eccentric Lex Luthor somehow became bigger because Superman existed. A self-proclaimed criminal genius requires something fairly extraordinary to pit his genius against.
Superman didn't have to diminish the other characters to be super. His presence gave them space to reveal more of themselves. I didn't have language for any of that at seven. I just knew I wanted to be Superman.
Strangely, we knew almost nothing about him
Here's the part I've found myself thinking about recently. What did Superman eat for breakfast? I haven't a clue. Did he have a morning routine? Did he make his bed? What did he think about when he couldn't sleep? Did he have a skincare regime? What were his ten rules for success? What did he do at 5.30 a.m. that apparently gave him an unfair advantage over the rest of us?
We didn't know, and somehow it didn't matter. We were given enough of Superman to understand something about him, but not enough to complete him. There were gaps. Wonderful, great gaps. I think we used to do something rather important with them. We filled them ourselves.
Jaws never showed me what I remember seeing
Jaws did something similar, although rather less comfortably. People left cinemas convinced they had watched a shark tear a woman apart. Yet so much of the horror existed outside the frame. There was dark water. Movement. Music. Panic. Suggestion, and your imagination did the rest.
The filmmaker didn't need to manufacture every detail of your fear because you brought something with you. You participated. That's what great storytelling used to understand remarkably well. The audience wasn't simply there to consume the finished product. We were given breadcrumbs and trusted to cross some of the distance ourselves.
Perhaps that is why characters could become so personal. There was enough room inside them for us. You could find something you already were, something you never wanted to become, or perhaps something you might one day like to be.
I couldn't fly, but I could be kind. I couldn't stop a speeding train, but perhaps I could help somebody. I wasn't Superman, but there was enough left unfinished for a seven-year-old boy to wonder which parts of him might be possible.
Then we started filling in the blanks
I don't know exactly when it changed. Technology didn't arrive one Tuesday afternoon and steal our imagination. Nor do I particularly want to return to three television channels and waiting until tomorrow morning to discover what happened yesterday. The world moved forward, as it always does, and much of what it gave us is extraordinary.
But somewhere along the way, we became very good at filling in the blanks. Today, I can know what somebody had for breakfast, where they trained, what they're wearing, where they're going, who they're with, what they believe, what annoyed them, what made them happy, and occasionally far more about their trip to the toilet than I ever needed to know.
We document ourselves in extraordinary resolution. Entertainment has changed too. Characters arrive increasingly complete. The spectacle is astonishing. The explosions are bigger, the visual effects are extraordinary, and entire universes can be rendered convincingly in front of us.
I watched many of the modern superhero films with my sons and enjoyed them. They were incredibly impressive. Yet strangely, I remember relatively few of them. I didn't need to put much into the film. My job was to watch.
We used to participate
Perhaps that's the distinction I've been trying to put my finger on. We have slowly moved from participating in stories to consuming completed ones. I wonder whether the same thing has quietly happened to our lives.
Social media shows us what success looks like. Advertising shows us what happiness looks like. Influencers show us what a morning routine looks like. Streaming platforms decide what we might enjoy next. Algorithms learn what holds our attention and feed us increasingly precise versions of it. Now artificial intelligence can answer almost any question we care to ask.
None of those things is inherently bad. But convenience always involves a trade. Every time something else fills in a blank for us, there is one fewer blank we have to fill ourselves. That matters because something rather important lives in those empty spaces.
The gaps were never empty
It's in the gaps where desire lives. Joy. Love. Fun. Curiosity. Adventure. Surprise. Wonder. Those things require a little uncertainty.
Wonder cannot really exist when everything is already known. Curiosity has very little work to do when every question is answered before we've properly asked it. Adventure becomes difficult when the route, destination, restaurant, hotel, photographs, reviews, and ten things you absolutely must do when you arrive have already been placed in front of you.
Eventually, we begin subscribing to other people's versions of excitement rather than creating our own. Life can become remarkably efficient while somehow becoming smaller.
We all know the language. "It is what it is." "I'm fine." "Same shit, different day." Days become weeks. Weeks become years. Years quietly become decades. Nothing necessarily went terribly wrong. Perhaps nothing sufficiently unexpected happened at all.
What do you want?
I ask people this question surprisingly often. Not what do you want to stop. Not what would you like to have less of. Not what is currently wrong with your life. What do you actually want?
There is often a pause. Sometimes the first answer is a lottery win. But money isn't really an answer. Money is possibility. I'm interested in what you'd do with the possibility. So I ask again. What do you want? Sometimes the answer is simply, "I don't know."
I find that fascinating. Ask people what they don't want, and many can give you a list of 450 things without stopping for breath. Ask for three things they genuinely want, and suddenly we're struggling.
Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. Desire requires imagination. You have to be able to stand somewhere that doesn't yet exist and create enough of a picture to feel pulled towards it.
If we spend our lives consuming pictures other people have completed for us, perhaps that particular muscle simply doesn't get exercised very often. It isn't gone. We've just stopped asking quite so much of it.
Maybe the blank was the gift
This isn't an argument against technology, social media, modern films, or artificial intelligence. Quite the opposite. I think we are entering one of the most extraordinary periods humanity has ever experienced. Answers are becoming abundant. Information is everywhere. Technology can remove friction from parts of life that previous generations simply had to endure.
But perhaps that makes the remaining gaps more precious, not less. Because those are the places where we still get to participate. Where we get to wonder. Where we get to decide. Where something can surprise us. Where we can become curious enough to wander slightly beyond the life we've already been shown.
Perhaps that's why I still think about Christopher Reeve all these years later. Superman didn't show me how to be him. He left enough blank space for me to imagine what being a better version of me might look like.
Strong when strength was needed. Gentle when it wasn't. Kind without needing a reason. Able to contribute where I could rather than waiting until I could save the entire world. He couldn't give a seven-year-old boy the answers to life. Thank goodness he didn't.
Do the thing
Perhaps that's ultimately what all of this comes down to. Do the thing. Not recklessly. Not carelessly. But with intent. Your thing will be different from mine, and that's rather the point. It doesn't need to make sense to everybody else. It doesn't need to have been done before, approved by the internet, or validated by somebody with more followers than you. Sometimes it simply needs enough empty space for you to become curious about what might happen if you tried.
Maybe that's one of the things children understand rather better than we do. They haven't yet learned to need quite so much certainty before they explore. Give a child a cardboard box, and it can become a racing car, a castle, a spaceship, or, if the afternoon requires it, something to wear on their head.
The gaps aren't a problem. They're where the adventure begins. Perhaps I've retained a little of that childlike curiosity myself because, when I'm nervous about doing something, somewhere in the back of my mind, there's still a cape.
It sounds ridiculous. I'm 54 years old. I know perfectly well there isn't one. But sometimes imagining it's there is enough. Damn it. Put the cape on. Do the thing.
We don't need to fly. We don't need laser vision. We don't even need a magic cape, although, in my experience, the cape helps. Perhaps every now and then, we just need to stop accepting the completed picture long enough to ask ourselves, “What would I put in the blank?” Then go and find out.
If you'd like to explore more of my writing on human behaviour, expansion, and what it might mean to become more human in an increasingly automated world, visit my website.
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Read more from Aran Bray
Aran Bray, Founder of Be Outstanding | Speaker | Human Performance Coach
Aran Bray is the creator of The Take One Moment Method (TOM), a practical approach to human behaviour that focuses on the moment before action. His work centres on why people don’t act on what they already know, and how automatic patterns are formed through repetition, conditioning, and emotional response. By helping individuals recognise and interrupt these patterns in real time, he enables lasting behavioural change and genuine self-direction. Aran works with individuals, leaders, and organisations to develop the ability to act clearly when it matters most.
