August 17, 2026
Dear Leland and Everett,
Today I kick off a project of sorts. I anticipate it will span several letters. The letters may be consecutive, but they may not: I reserve the right to interrupt this project to write about other topics; I also reserve the right to come back to this project when appropriate. My intention is to title letters in the project “Your dad’s Theory of Everything, part x”.
Part of me wants to spend more time explaining the project. But I am realizing that is my fear trying to get in the way, and I just need to dive in. So here goes: today I want to talk about stories.
Indulge me on a quick diversion to explain how I came to think of story as foundational human technology.
Anthropologist Robin Dunbar, based on a correlation between neocortex volume and group size in primate species, extrapolated and predicted humans can maintain roughly 150 stable social relationships at any given time. The thesis that humans are limited to 150 relationships at a time is referred to as Dunbar’s number. Whether Dunbar is correct in proposing that humans are limited to ~150 relationships is not what I want to explore today. Neither is whether the relationship is causal – brain size determines group size – or not. Whatever the real number and the ultimate cause, what stuck with me regarding Dunbar’s number is that there appears to be a link between brain size and group sizes in primates.
What strikes me about Dunbar’s number is that humans appear to be unique in our ability to organize in groups that vastly exceed the limits one might predict based on our brains. While our core stable relationships might be governed by the size and makeup of our brains, we are wholly unique in the primate world in our ability to organize in groups (cities, nations, religions, etc.) that are orders of magnitude larger than our brains would be expected to handle.
Why? To the extent people have examined humanity’s ability to organize groups larger than our brain makeup might predict, we typically point to the mechanisms – language, laws, culture, religion – but for me this all distills to story. Humans are a storytelling species, and I submit that these shared stories are what allow humans to organize in larger groups. Shared stories allow humans to establish a shared understanding of the world, our place in the world, and how we are meant to behave. Stories lead us to establish social norms and mores, which enable us to approach and interact with strangers without fear for our safety. Stories are foundational to religions, nations, corporations, and any other organization with a shared mission and purpose. Without shared stories, for better and worse I suspect humans would still be wandering the earth in bands of 150 or so people.
As I write, our shared stories are breaking down. Developed nations have become less religious, reducing our reliance on one traditional dimension of cohesion from story. As people migrate at an accelerating rate, we find ourselves increasingly interacting with others whose behavior is guided by different stories than our own. And we are currently reexamining the American story, as our faith in the existing story collapses.
The current American experience is, at least in part, typical. When a society begins to fall upon hard times, that society inherently looks to their shared story for clues regarding where they went wrong and how they might course correct. When a society fails to find solutions in their shared stories, the people begin to examine the stories themselves for holes, gaps, and potential modifications. Since its founding, America has seen itself as born of freedoms and inherent human rights, along with a specific brand of rugged individualism and exceptionalism. Since WWII, America also defined itself based on our institutions, seeing ourselves as global guardians of democracy, peace, and truth.
And so, Americans are reexamining our stories to see where we went wrong. Some blame immigration, others xenophobia. Some blame racism (particularly institutional racism), others blame “woke” and DEI. Some accuse America of being hopelessly inherently flawed due to a perception that it was built upon a foundation of slavery; others accuse America (and the West more broadly) of creating undemocratic institutions that increasingly dictate our daily behavior. Personally, I don’t find any of these accusations and proposed redefinitions of our shared story particularly compelling. For one thing, they all rely hopelessly on the theory of “good guys and bad guys”: that there are good guys and bad guys in the world, and that one need must first classify humanity and then proceed accordingly (e.g. reward the good guys and punish the bad guys). Personally, I no longer adhere to the belief that humans can be split into good guys and bad guys. To the degree good and evil are real, I agree with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that “…the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Beyond that, I’m coming to believe fear vs love is a more relevant continuum to explore than good vs evil. But more on that topic another time.
In my dream world, these letters would contribute to the formulation of new shared stories. More realistically and pragmatically, I am hopeful that writing these letters helps me engage with the world, in hopes we might find ways to curtail our most toxic impulses during this time of chaos.
Stories are not just what hold us together as societies. Individual human psyches organize around stories, often subconsciously. I’ve seen folks refer to “limiting beliefs” and “invisible scripts” as descriptors meant to capture this phenomenon. But it’s genuinely shocking how often we get stuck due to some invalid underlying assumption or story. Samples include “I am not good enough”, “I am unloveable”, “money is the root of all evil”, “good guys do x, bad guys do y”, “that person always does that thing I hate”, “I am bad at math” or “I am good at music”, or my current bugaboo “I can’t do x until I do a, b, and c first”.
A genuinely stunning amount of my energy over the last few years has been directed toward identifying the stories I used to define me or my circumstances before working to unlearn and discard the harmful or debilitating among them. I was unpleasantly surprised by how many stories were unconsciously buried in my thought processes and belief systems, and I was shocked to discover how much of my behavior those stories drove. In particular, I was shocked to discover just how many of the dissatisfactory elements of my life had been created by these stories.
Over time I’ve come to develop a toolkit for identifying and releasing unhelpful stories. But I haven’t abandoned the use of stories altogether. Indeed, I’ve come to appreciate not only the pernicious potential for self-limiting stories to dictate our circumstances, but also why humans find stories valuable in the first place.
For whatever reason, humans retain compelling stories. Our brains possess a limited capacity to remember information. Stories seem to provide scaffolding that allows us to organize information in dimensional ways that enable us to exponentially expand the amount of information available for us to access when needed. Need to remember a fact? Just revisit that portion of a compelling story and find the necessary data retained therein. Storytellers (authors, movie makers, etc) are deeply familiar with the power of story, and purposefully embed things they want us to remember or believe in otherwise compelling stories, in the hopes that their stories subconsciously nudge us to accept or retain whatever nuggets of wisdom they wish to impart.
Nowadays, I try to be conscious of my stories (and these letters are part of that attempt to create awareness). I also try to be purposeful about holding stories loosely, so that I might release untrue or unhelpful stories once I realize they are no longer true or helpful. Finally, I’ve developed some tools to help me identify when I am unconscious of the stories driving my behavior; these tools do not prevent me from allowing some stories to become unconscious, but they enable me to accelerate the process of becoming aware and, thus, taking action to release them.
Part of the purpose of these TOE letters will be to document, and thus examine, some of the stories I currently hold. Part of the purpose is to contrast my stories with what I perceive to be stories held by others. What might be unique to this project, relative to my letters thus far, is that I don’t know what I expect you to glean from the TOE letters. I just feel a need to write them, and sense that the need comes from a place I can trust.
Hopefully this project, and its value to you, becomes clearer over time. Forgive me that I cannot articulate my vision or purpose today, and please indulge me on an exploration with an unknown destination.
I love you,
Dad
Letters to Leland 