A VISION
The Stories We Need Next
The future will belong to those who can imagine it. My work is to help you write it into being.
Stories are how we remember what matters.
The Quiet Truth
We are living inside stories that were written long before we arrived.
Stories that taught us who we must be, what we must value, and how we must survive. Stories built on hierarchy, extraction, dominance, and the myth that we should stand alone. Stories that framed productivity as worth, exhaustion as virtue, and nature as something to be used rather than understood.
These stories shaped our cultures. They shaped our institutions. They shaped us — and we rarely questioned them because we were raised inside them.
But these stories are not ancient, and they are not universal. They are a relatively young cultural script — perhaps a thousand years old in some places, far younger in others — that centres productivity over presence, hierarchy over relationship, and independence over interdependence.
For a time, this narrative organised society effectively. It built systems, economies, and empires. But it has depleted the planet, strained communities, and left many of us disconnected from ourselves and each other.
It is a story that is ending — not because we rage against it, but because it can no longer hold the complexity of the world we inhabit.
When a story can no longer hold a world, a new story must begin.
The Stories That Saved Us
Before there were books or industries or markets, there were stories. Stories were humanity’s first technology — our original storage system. We placed knowledge into narrative so we could remember how to survive, how to belong, how to care for one another.
We are not programmed for instruction; we are programmed for story.
Children understand this instinctively.
As a child, I survived because of stories — because the children in those worlds survived. They did not need adults; adults were often absent or irrelevant. Story became my lifeboat. It held me afloat when nothing else did.
Stories can save us. They can also confine us. The problem is not that story shapes us — it is that the story we inherited is too small for who we are becoming.
The Stories That Keep Us Small
The dominant cultural story — the one we rarely name because we have swum in it all our lives — tells us:
independence is strength
productivity is value
community is optional
the earth is an asset
rest is indulgence
competition is natural
belonging must be earned
vulnerability is risk
This story has shaped governments, markets, workplaces, family structures, and inner worlds. It has shaped our anxieties, ambitions, and identities.
It is a story without a future.
The Stories That Can Free Us
If we want a different world, we do not begin with policy or industry or strategy. We begin with story — because story is the operating system beneath everything else.
We need stories that restore what we have forgotten:
humans are interdependent
the earth is a partner, not a possession
meaning matters more than metrics
kindness is a form of intelligence
community is strength, not compromise
reciprocity is a survival strategy
belonging is essential
nature does not thrive in isolation — and neither do we
The stories we need next are regenerative, relational, ecological, and humane.
How We Write These Stories — The ARC™ Way
To write a new cultural narrative, we need a new narrative architecture. This is why I created ARC™, a framework that aligns the three forces that shape every story the human mind trusts.
A — Archetype
The structural patterns the brain recognises instantly — the deep logic of resilience, transformation, connection, and return. Archetype lets us build new stories that feel emotionally true, not inherited by obligation.
R — Reasoning
The cognitive pathways that shape how people feel, interpret, and decide. Reasoning allows us to design stories that lower threat, reduce friction, deepen clarity, and support actions that nourish instead of extract.
C — Culture
The metaphors, symbols, and shared meanings that make a story intuitive and safe to adopt. Culture lets us speak to people in a language their nervous system already understands.
Together, ARC™ becomes a blueprint for rewriting not just individual stories, but collective ones — stories that:
expand identity
strengthen community
honour the earth
and help us build futures worth living in
The Invitation
This work is not only for authors, or for businesses, or for individuals.
It is for anyone who feels the quiet unease of a story ending — and the subtle hum of a new one beginning.
If you are ready to imagine differently, to question the script you inherited, and to create narratives that heal rather than harm, you are already part of what comes next.
Call to Action
The next cultural story won’t be written by institutions. It will be written by people willing to imagine differently. If that’s you, I’d love to work together.