Welcome to The Metaphor.
“Reality is narrative and our only job is to make it beautiful,” is the ethos of The Metaphor, put into as few words as possible. Take away any one of them, it becomes something else.
“Reality is narrative” is both the most compressed clause and the most arrogant. It dares to defy a basic assumption that almost everyone holds - even a lot of the very religious and out-there mystics. The assumption is buried in how we all think and talk, which solidified about five hundred years ago as the scientific method took hold in our imaginations, and Descartes declared “I think, therefore I am.” The assumption suggests, and sometimes outright claims, that what is “out there” can be measured and reduced to cause-and-effect explanations.
Who is doing all that looking and measuring of stuff “out there” is pinched smaller and smaller until it is nothing more than a weird ghost in the world-machine – “consciousness” or its many other names. It is explained away as a fluke or even an illusion, even though “illusions” are products of consciousness.
“Reality is narrative” demands a radically different approach: this mysterious “consciousness” is assumed to be one of the fundamental building blocks of the cosmos. And, just like in physics, where you can measure the behavior of the fundamental particles to arrive at Laws of Physics, so too can you observe the behavior of consciousness across time to arrive at stable narrative patterns, or the Laws of Mythos, if you like. Put in plain language, reading literature and telling stories. It suggests a cosmic significance to storytelling.
“Our only job” means that this isn’t about entertaining ourselves with big ideas. Reality demands meaningful action and we have a duty to Being itself, not merely to our own preferences or comfort. This “job” is not a job among our other jobs, but a leap into the great adventure of our lives with wild abandon. From there, all other jobs either become tools along the way or reveal themselves irrelevant.
The Metaphor is productive and practical, but it is not self-help. It does not believe problems of life can be solved like you fix a car. The problems of life can only be solved by wisdom, which is only gained by realizing how bad the situation really is and somehow still finding the hope to move towards a light only you can see.
Thus, “make it beautiful.” Don’t make yourself great, or make me awesome, or even get what you think you want. Beauty is something that happens when you’re doing anything with other people in mind. If I told you to clean your house, you would automatically work for imagined guests, thinking of little ways to delight them. In this way, beauty is humble, because you can always make something more beautiful with your attention, even if you can’t make it more grand.
The focus is on beauty over, say, truth and goodness, not because it is better than those, but because it is the one we have most forgotten. We have plenty of truth without beauty – that’s materialism. We also have goodness without beauty – that’s liberal democracy. These impulses are not wrong. They just lack balance. Restoring balance is a better goal for a publication than the more common one that promises gnostic knowledge to gain personal power, which I do not believe in.
However, I do believe the institutions that hold power can be redeemed. A few people inspired to bring beauty into business or politics could transform the world. I don’t believe that it would be an exercise in charity, either, because beauty is the most valuable thing on the planet. Businesses shoot themselves in the foot for ignoring that. Those that don’t may move more slowly in the short term, but will win exponentially in the long-run. There are countless examples in history and we’re just waiting for a few more to have the courage to emerge.
To that end, I will be publishing free essays every Saturday morning, indefinitely. If you want those as long as The Metaphor exists, sign up for the free tier. Slowly but surely, I will be mapping the mythos of the modern world as it is actually lived, in the form of narrative non-fiction.
Paid subscribers will get a few extra, deep dives, and Q&As. Eventually, I will build out more benefits to the paid tier, including hopefully merchandise. For now, I am mostly just grateful for your support.
If you want to partner on a project, business or otherwise, reach out to me. You can check out the narrative work I’ve done here and get a better sense of a potential fit.
Thank you for reading.
If you’re new to these ideas, start here:
For some thoughts on relationships and love:
For on-the-ground mythos:
