What Story Are We Telling Ourselves?
Last night I had a dream. I woke up and couldnโt remember it, but I had this strange feeling that everything is actually sailing smoothly, if you look at it from a much bigger perspective of time. An old thought came back to me: what story are we telling ourselves as a species? As individuals, we each have our own stories unfolding. But whether we like it or not, they unfold inside a much larger story, the story of humanity as a whole. We are stories within a greater story. Sometimes a metaphor explains things better than facts alone. And the metaphor that keeps returning to me is this: the story of humanity looks a lot like the life of a single human being, just on a vastly different scale and pace. The future isnโt written in stone. It doesnโt exist yet. Itโs a probability pattern. Thatโs why both extreme optimism and extreme pessimism miss the point. And thatโs why we need to be careful with self-fulfilling prophecies. The stories we tell ourselves shape what we build next. As far as we know, our species appeared around 200,000 years ago. Most of that journey is still a mystery. Around 10โ12,000 years ago, we began settling and organizing differently. Around 6,000 years ago, what we call civilisation began to take shape cities, monuments, complex social systems. Today, we live in a global civilization where information travels at the speed of light. Yet many of the stories we still live by were formed in completely different conditions. Theyโre becoming outdated. If we see humanity as a single life, then our early history is like infancy, learning, sensing, reading patterns, understanding the forces shaping reality. As we grew, we formed larger societies. And like any adolescent, we tested boundaries, competed with each other, and played games of strength and dominance. Like teen age boys do. Then came a phase of deeper questioning. Collectively, this looked like the scientific revolution. Like going to college. We learned a lot but we also partied hard. In civilizational terms, that party was oil: a massive energy surplus that let us do more than ever before.