What Story Are We Telling Ourselves?

Last night I had a dream. I woke up and couldn’t 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 isn’t written in stone. It doesn’t exist yet. It’s a probability pattern. That’s why both extreme optimism and extreme pessimism miss the point. And that’s 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 10–12,000 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. They’re becoming outdated.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.

But college isn’t the end of life.

So maybe where we are now is the graduation party. Some people have already left early, knowing tomorrow matters. Others are still partying like it will never end.

At some point, the story has to change to continue.

What we need to overcome is familiarity. There’s a deep tendency to repeat old stories simply because they’re familiar, even when they’re destructive. That happens inside individuals, and it’s happening collectively now.

What always bothered me personally was the story that says humans are the cancer of the Earth, doomed to destroy everything, including ourselves. That story is a dead end. And it becomes dangerous when we start believing it.

So maybe this is where we are. We’ve grown. We’ve learned. We’ve made mistakes. And now we have to decide what we’re going to do with what we’ve learned.

I don’t know the details of the next story. But I have a sense of its foundation: not good versus evil, but balance.

Balance within ourselves.

Balance between ourselves.

Balance between us and the natural world.

In that story, I’m excited to be here.

In that story, I want to participate.

So maybe the real choice in front of us is this:

which stories we decide collectively to tell ourselves, knowing that those stories shape us just as much as we shape them.

And maybe we just have to give our selves a chance, we just graduated and need to get our shit together. We are not late, maybe the best part of our collective story just begun.

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