Human beings have always used stories to understand the world, we tell stories to explain who we are, what matters, and how to live. For most of history, myths and legends have offered the model for courage, warnings about greed and explanations for the stars. They gave people a framework for making sense of life.
My first real encounter with this idea came through Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. He writes that stories are the invisible forces that structure our lives: money, businesses, nations, families, religions, all are built on shared narratives that only exist because we collectively believe in them. Stories are not purely a decoration around reality; they are the architecture of reality.
Across civilisations, mythology and folklore served a purpose: they helped communities navigate uncertainty. Stories shaped morality, identity, and belonging. They were a shared language of meaning. But as we move deeper into the twenty-first century, the stories we live by are no longer shared in the same way, they’re splintering.
Bedtime stories
In an age of mass communication and narrowcasting, we are no longer absorbing one shared set of stories. Instead, we are fed personalised micro-narratives spat out of algorithms on ‘social’ platforms designed to capture attention rather than nurture connection.
Marshall McLuhan wrote that “the medium is the message”, a statement that feels even more urgent today than when he first proposed it. McLuhan argued that the form of a medium, not just its content, shapes how we think, behave, and relate to one another. His theory offers a lens through which we can understand many of the societal challenges we now face. The issue isn’t only what adults and children see online; it’s the structure of digital media itself, fast, addictive and individualised.
This becomes even clearer when we consider the wider shift from broadcasting to narrowcasting. Broadcasting once offered shared cultural touchpoints: the same stories, the same news, the same collective folklore or mythology. These narratives were not always accurate, but they provided a sense of belonging, a feeling of being part of a larger “we”.
Narrowcasting, by contrast, delivers personalised streams of content tailored to our preferences and behaviours. On the surface, this feels gratifying. But it also fragments our sense of community, reinforcing individualism by placing each of us inside our own curated worlds. The medium itself encourages us to prioritise the self: our tastes, our feeds, our identities.
And when each of us lives inside a different narrative stream, our shared myths begin to dissolve. In their place emerge new, personalised mythologies that shape how we see ourselves and what we believe is possible, even when they pull us further apart.
These are the new bedtime stories.
Modern mythology
One of the defining stories of our age is grind culture, a myth that worships overwork and tells us that success belongs only to the lone, tireless individual.
Grind culture whispers that if we just work hard enough, optimise every hour, and push through exhaustion, we will someday become the chosen ones who finally transcend the system we live in. It is a modern myth of self-liberation: the idea that freedom is earned through relentless effort rather than through collective care, shared opportunity, or systemic change.
This myth sustains itself by offering just enough of a dream, the occasional success story and the fairy tale of someone who “made it”. That fragment of a dream is often enough to stop us questioning the story itself. Enough to keep the story alive.
This is just one of the many stories that we are using to navigate the world today, and we can do better.
Stories for the future
We need new stories.
Stories that can move us forward, restore our sense of hope, and help us imagine futures worth striving for. We need to write the stories of the twenty-first century with intention, as the stories we tell now are the ones that will echo for generations to come.
Children absorb the stories around them long before they have the language to critique them. These early narratives form the scaffolding of their thinking, shaping their sense of identity, possibility, and place in the world. In an era where personalised, algorithmic myths seep into daily life, the stories we choose to share with children carry even greater weight. They become the bedrock they will draw on for decades, a foundation for empathy, resilience, creativity, and agency. In a world with millions of competing narratives, that foundation needs to be solid.
This is why we need stories that frame the world as a place to question, explore, and care for. Stories that engage with ideas of love and family, success, ambition, identity, and belonging in a meaningful way. We need stories that remind us we are part of something larger: our communities, our ecosystems, our history and our future.
Because in an age of noise and narrowcasting, telling meaningful stories becomes an act of resistance. It’s how we build healthier cultures and more grounded identities. It’s how we equip both children and adults to navigate this complex world, and how we find our way back to deeper connection with one another.
When we tell better stories, we begin to build a better world.
There has never been a more important moment to write, create, build, and imagine, both for now, and for the future.
