Add The Stories That
Are Killing Us
a Title Here
The crises of our time - in men's lives, in culture,
in our relationship with the planet -
are not separate emergencies.
They share a single root. That root is story.
Every life is shaped by stories it didn't choose. Stories about what strength looks like, what men are for, what power means, what the Earth is — stories written for a smaller version of the human being and a smaller version of the human moment. They served their time. They got us here. They will not get us through.
This book moves in expanding circles: from the universal reality that all human lives are running on inherited narrative, through the specific and vivid territory of men's lives — where the cost of the old stories is most visible and most urgent — through the institutions and economies our culture has built on top of them, and out to the existential. The stories driving personal isolation and suppressed feeling are the same stories driving ecological destruction. One pathology. Different scales.
The invitation is not to trade one story for another. It is to recover the full human being the old stories edited out — and to discover that fuller self is precisely what this moment in history requires.
What changes when you finish it
Readers who finish this book should be unable to move through their lives in quite the same way. Not because they have been given a new ideology, but because they can now see — the stories running their relationships, their ambitions, their silence, their rage, their sense of what the Earth is for.
Beneath that seeing is a felt recognition: that what has been diminished in us is not lost, only covered. The disconnection, the numbness, the performance — these are not evidence of who we are. They are evidence of what we were trained to become. From that recognition comes the beginning of authorship. And the possibility of returning to ourselves.
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Jon Symes has been tracing this question for thirty years. In 1997 he published Realigning for Change. His 2006 book Your Planet Needs You named the convergence of environmental collapse and cultural crisis before the language for it had fully formed.
For nearly a decade he led worldwide programs with the Pachamama Alliance, working to shift how people understood their relationship to the living world and to this moment in history.
He is a British-born narrative strategist based near San Francisco, working with leaders and organisations across six continents. He has also been through the fire of these inherited stories in his own life. Both the thinking and the fire are in this book.
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