Our Great Inheritance
We don't just make narratives. We inherit them from the network we're born into. Literally.
In many ways, our story begins inside the narrative of our parents. I was born in a hospital, weighing eleven and a half pounds, enough to make my size part of my origin story. I was born in Los Angeles, making me both an American and a Californian, identities that have shaped how people see me ever since. I was the second child and the first son, inheriting roles and expectations before I could speak.
Most of us are born into a story already in motion. Our culture, our language, our beliefs all arrive as a ready made framework. Before we can choose anything, we are shaped by it.
This inheritance is what allows civilizations to exist. It's how we build on what came before instead of starting from scratch. But it also means we often live inside frameworks we never consciously chose. We learn early on how the world works, or at least how we're told it works. These narratives tell us what is normal, what is valuable, what is possible. And when they go unexamined, they become invisible. We start to treat the napkin like it's the whole table.
The modern world is built on thousands of years of this inheritance. Most of us live inside such a dense abstraction of nature that we would struggle to survive in the wild itself. We have become dependent on these inherited tools for our survival. They were created because they worked.
To understand how powerful this inheritance can be, consider one of humanity's oldest surviving stories. One of the most traceable narratives we know is The Cosmic Hunt. Versions of this myth appear in cultures across the Northern Hemisphere: a hunter chases an animal into the sky, and they become constellations. Imagine looking up at night and seeing not random stars, but the frozen moment of a chase with Orion in stride, the prey just ahead.
This was no idle bedtime story. It was a map of the heavens, a seasonal clock, a survival manual. The story was a tool. It worked. That's why it was passed down for thousands of years.
When we understand that every story builds on earlier ones, we see the real power of inheritance. Narratives aren't just individual lenses. They're connected. They layer, overlap, and reinforce each other. They form a network.
We tend to think of our own life's story as the story. But step back far enough, and you see something different. There isn't just one napkin and one table. There's a constellation of napkins, scattered across time, connected by the threads of human memory. Each napkin, each framework, was drawn, used, and passed down because it worked for someone, somewhere, at some point in our shared history.
The danger comes when we forget we're looking through these inherited lenses at all. When we mistake the map for the territory. When we let unexamined narratives make our choices for us, limiting what we think is possible before we even begin.
That's our great inheritance. Not just the stories we know, but the invisible architecture of stories beneath them, the ones that quietly shape our reality.
The more we can see those connections, the more freedom we have to choose. We can take the best from what we've inherited, leave behind what no longer serves us, and evolve the rest. We are already part of the evolutionary cycle in nature. Seeing our narratives for what they are empowers us to shape it.