How Zeus Helped Me Understand the Messiness of Power

I met Zeus in a parking garage. Not the marble-floored kind beneath luxury hotels, but the crumbling concrete one at a 24-hour gym near a highway exit in Queens. He was leaning against a dented Volvo, iced coffee in hand, watching a thunderstorm roll in. I’d been researching his myths for weeks—his affairs, his rages, his eagle—but I’d never expected to find him here, in a white button-up shirt half-soaked by the rain, squinting at the sky like he already knew the storm’s name.

We talked. I don’t remember why I stayed. Maybe because he looked like someone who’d watched civilizations rise and collapse and still remembered the taste of honeyed wine. When he described overthrowing his father Cronus, he didn’t mention vengeance. He said, “I wanted to build something where the old rules didn’t fit anymore. That’s always messy.” I’d spent years writing about modern power structures—politicians, tech titans, CEOs. Zeus made me see them differently.

The God Is Present

Before that night, I thought of gods as metaphors. Zeus was a symbol of male dominance, or of unchecked anger. But there he was, present, complaining about the gym’s new smoothie bar and asking if I’d read the Iliad lately. Later, I realized this was his whole deal. The ancient Greeks didn’t see deities as distant abstractions. Zeus was in the storm and in the courtroom, in the marriage bed and on the battlefield. He made me question how many modern systems I treated as faceless forces—capitalism, democracy, “the market”—when maybe they needed to be confronted like real people.

Authority Has a Face

Zeus kept his coffee cup crumpled in his hand like a stress ball. “You know,” he said, “they say I’m vain because I care what they call me. But a name is where power lands.” In every myth, he’s called Father, Cloud-Gatherer, Thunderer—titles that tether him to the world he governs. I’d spent years writing about faceless institutions, but Zeus forced me to remember: power always has a shape. He didn’t just “control the sky.” He argued with Hera, negotiated with Poseidon, punished mortals who forgot their manners. Leadership, he said, “isn’t about being everywhere. It’s about deciding when you have to be.”

Chaos Can Be Honest

We met again later, in a diner where the fluorescent lights buzzed like angry wasps. I asked why he always seemed to start chaos. The Titanomachy, the flood that wiped out humanity, the way he turned Medusa’s hair to snakes. He laughed. “You think I’m the storm? I’m the spark. The mess comes from things breaking free.” For years, I’d seen disruption as a threat. Zeus saw it as proof something needed to change. “You want order?” he said. “Start by burning everything that’s pretending it’s not decaying.”

Anger Has Its Uses

After a hurricane flooded part of the city, I texted him: How do you live with the collateral damage? He wrote back: You don’t. You carry it. When I brought this up, he stared at his coffee. “Anger isn’t the opposite of control. It’s the sign you’ve reached your limit.” He mentioned Salmoneus, the king who mocked Zeus by mimicking thunder. Zeus didn’t just punish him—he erased him from the myths. “Some hubris deserves to be forgotten,” he said. I’d always been taught that righteous anger was dangerous. Zeus showed me it could also be a form of justice.

Myth Is a Living Thing

Zeus stopped meeting me after that. Maybe he got bored. Or maybe I’d asked the last question he was willing to answer. Months later, I was reading Aeschylus and stumbled on a line about “the storm that bends the oaks.” Suddenly, I saw it: myths aren’t relics. They’re arguments about power, written in stories. Zeus wasn’t a cautionary tale about pride. He was a record of how hard it is to build something that lasts—and how necessary.

I’ll never know if that night in the parking garage was real. But I do know this: when I talk to leaders now, I don’t ask what they want. I ask how they sleep.

Talk to Zeus on HoloDream. Ask him what he’d do about the gridlocked Congress, or the way the weather keeps breaking. He’ll remind you that power isn’t clean. But it can still be honest.