Pinkie Boadicea was born in Philadelphia in August, 2010. She earned her Ph.D in economics in 2013 and now works at a university in Tokyo, Japan. You might wonder how someone could earn a doctoral degree only three years after she was born and I would applaud you for your perceptiveness. Pinkie used to live in an old Story of existence that claimed that humans are selfish right down to their DNA, that the value of a life can be measured in dollars and stock options, that beauty and virtue were fundamentally worthless until you could trade them on an open market, that hard work would lead to happiness, and that sex, food, vacation time and having more than one interest at once were all vices to be eradicated from our lives. In the old Story, she went by a different name, which is why she was only really born a few years ago.

In recent years, Pinkie has been traveling on a journey towards a new Story. What is this Story thing you might ask? Well, I think you all know what stories are on a very fundamental level, like the Story of Pooh Bear or Peter Pan, or the Story of the birth of the United States. They tell you how to look at the world and how to think about the things that happen and the characters that they happen to. Stories also teach us how to think about ourselves. Just think about the amount of time parents will spend reading and telling their children stories. As we get older, though, we start to get full of stories and so we spend less time paying them attention. The stories don’t go away, but actually we carry them with us throughout our lives whether consciously or unconsciously.

Many of the ailments that we face today are symptoms of an expired Story. I believe that a new Story is already in the process of being born. Inside that story is an understanding that our own happiness does not detract from the happiness of others but actually raises the spirits of those around us. It holds in it an appreciation for the natural world upon which our lives depend, and a recognition of the extrinsic value of life. Residents of this Story recognize that health, companionship and abundance are the natural human condition.

This blog is a documentation of my path between Stories. I hope it will also prove a useful travel guide for others who might suspect that their Stories are not as comfortable as they originally thought.