Better Than Ever But Only Together

Feeling overwhelmed, discouraged, want to make things better but not sure how? Say these six words to yourself, regularly, and it will change your brain, your blood, and your life. Science says.

As I said way back when this whole project started, storytelling is an astonishingly powerful force. When I’m scared or overwhelmed, I take great strength and comfort in the truth that even a small story can change everything.

That’s not just science. That’s history. Stories are rewriting and shifting history all the time. Right now I’m thinking of two stories — one five words, one four — that have changed the world dramatically.

I promise you know them.

One of those stories saved Western Democracy during the most perilous time in modern history. The other story has split a country in half.

That’s the monkey’s paw of storytelling: A story can change everything… but not always for the better.

I’ve explained the science behind Churchill’s story before. The science holds, but this story is not going to work for us now. We can all agree this is no time to keep calm, and the last thing we can afford to do is carry on.

The red hat story is powerful, because it speaks to a deep fear that the world is out of control, moving in the wrong direction, leaving us behind. The red hat story helps half of us feel less afraid, and more in charge.

But for half of us, the red hat makes us feel more afraid, less in control; it makes us feel like we are moving in the wrong direction.

The red hat story is powerful. But it’s also scaring us, dividing us, breaking us apart.

Oh, and one more thing. It’s literally not true. In fact, it’s actually an impossible story.

I wonder if we could write a better one?

Great Again Is A Broken Story

For all its power and emotional resonance, this four word red hat story has two lies in it: GREAT and AGAIN.

Let’s start with GREAT. The red hat story is built on a deep longing people feel to return to a safer, simpler, more secure time. In The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory, a fantastic book about Christianity’s collapse to extremism, Tim Alberta quotes a leader of the evangelical movement on how it started: “We want to go back to the 1950s but without the racism and the sexism.”

Well, okay, but the racism and the sexism was sort of a defining feature of the 1950s. In this mythical past we long to return to, there were no civil rights. Women couldn’t have credit cards, or work in executive positions. People who didn’t fit into a narrow acceptable band were ostracized from society. Oh, and also, a family could survive on one income, which they absolutely could not today.

And even if they could, AGAIN is always impossible.

To quote Mary Chapin Carpenter, when it comes to life, “There’s fast, slow and stalled, no reverse.” Time travel doesn’t exist, so there is no going back and also, do we really want a world without DoorDash, civil rights, and the survival rate for breast cancer was 22 percent?

Great again isn’t true, and it isn’t possible. It’s a broken story that is breaking us apart.

Fortunately, we can do better.

We always have.

What’s Better Than Great Again?

I love the science behind better than ever. It speaks to the growth mindset, to a goal that is admirable and universal.

I mean literally, better than ever is a better promise than great again. It has the added bonus of being true.

Better than ever is the entire story of humanity, and especially Americans. It’s why the Pilgrims came here, and it’s why immigrants continue to show up today. (If you think the country needs less immigrants, well, I imagine Native Americans would agree with you, but we’d need to go all the way back to evicting the Pilgrims, if we wanted to be fair.)

And the truth is, we can never go back. We can only get better. And good news: we are! In his book Enlightenment Now, “In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide.”

But there’s a real problem with this story, and why Pinker’s book didn’t change the national mood or the trends of fear and despair.

The reason the red hat story still resonates for millions, the reason we are all afraid, is because most of us believe the world isn’t getting better. More people than ever say this country is going in the wrong direction.

Simply put, better than ever might be true, but it doesn’t feel true, and when it comes to storytelling, feelings trump facts.

Better than ever doesn’t feel believable.

So what’s a storyteller to do?

Sounds like we need another three words. And something else too.

….But Only Together

As Barbara Boll-Branch’s research showed, the two most important factors in human flourishing are to engage regularly in community, and to have good close relationships. But we are in the midst of a loneliness epidemic. Only 18% of Americans feel connected to a community; red hat voters are more likely to say they have not one friend.

We have become more divided, more angry, more isolated, and it doesn’t matter if so many things are getting better.

We can’t flourish when we’re alone.

We can’t change for the better when we’re broken apart.

We’ve got to become ferociously empathetic.

If we want to get better than ever, we’ve got to do it together.

Better Than Ever, But Only Together!

If you hang out with me, it is likely that you have heard this story already, and on Saturday, I took it public, waving my story along with 7500 other people who had their own.

And I was overjoyed with how much our stories overlapped. So many speakers talked about the need to protect each other, to come together, to turn away from the cruelty and back towards caring for each other.

Less about who we want to destroy, and more about what we want to transform.

Less about resistance, and more about creating something else.

Less about division, and more about unification.

My friend Sunita (pictured above) said to me in excitement: “This totally confirms everything you’ve been saying!” (She brought her story to complement mine, and to honor Cory Booker.)

Dad texted me afterwards:

Now let’s be clear.

I am not Winston Churchill, and Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are definitely not going to fund this movement. I am one of like 1800 Substacks that are showing up in your inbox today.

But that’s okay, because this is what I know about stories.

The best ones start with a single spark, and they work from the inside out.

Want to play along? It’s simple. Start telling this story to yourself. Six words. You can edit to make it work for you. It’s a work in progress, and we’re going to build it as we go along.

But to start, this week, just tell yourself this story, right now, whenever you think about it.

Science is clear. This story will change the chemicals in your bloodstream. It will change the structure of your brain. It will shift your neural networks.

Better than ever, but only together.

Tell the story, quietly in your head, to start, and let’s see what happens next.