We have a habit of finishing other people’s narratives for them.
A soldier dies in a conflict. We say it was for a noble cause. We say they were heroes. And maybe somewhere in that, there’s truth. But we’ve never walked in their shoes. We don’t know if they joined because they believed in something, or because they were running from an unhappy home. We don’t know if the military was idealism or escape, purpose or survival. We just know it’s what we’re supposed to say, so we say it.
This gap between what we know and what we claim to know runs deeper than war stories. It’s everywhere. It’s in how we talk about success, about leadership, about power, about why people do what they do.
The truth is messier than the narratives we’ve inherited.
There’s something easier about using the story everyone expects. It requires less of us. It doesn’t demand we actually see the person in front of us. It doesn’t ask us to sit with complexity or uncomfortable questions, like: why would anyone in power behave this way? What are they actually afraid of?
When we zoom out from the personal to the systemic, the pattern becomes clearer. Power consolidates around those who believe more power will finally be enough. Money becomes the proxy for control because it feels manageable, quantifiable, like if you just get enough of it, you’ll be safe. But safety never arrives. There’s always a bigger number, another rung, one more thing that will finally satisfy the hunger.
And the structures that emerge from this? They mirror the dysfunction we know from homes. The golden child who gets everything because they fit the mold. The scapegoat who takes the blame for what the system created. The invisible ones who learned long ago not to ask for attention.
We just scaled it up. Gave it nations. Gave it institutions. Gave it the power to shape generations.
The terrifying part isn’t the system itself. It’s that we all somehow know how it works, and we keep participating anyway. We can fill in the blanks easily now. That ease should alarm us. The fact that we recognize the pattern so quickly means we’ve seen it work. We’ve seen it rewarded.
Leadership positions are treated like leverage for personal accumulation instead of what they actually are: the chance to influence people’s lives. To build something that doesn’t break the next person who touches it.
But when you’re trapped in the web of acquisition, when you’re trying to escape your own history through accumulation or control, it’s hard to lead differently. You become what hurt you, or you become what you needed and couldn’t find.
This isn’t a call to burn it all down or to shame individuals. It’s simpler and sadder than that. It’s an acknowledgment that we’re breaking each other because we haven’t learned to see each other. We haven’t learned to ask why instead of assuming we know.
When a soldier dies, we could ask: who was this person, really? What would have made their life meaningful? That question requires sitting with someone’s actual humanity instead of the symbol we need them to be.
When a leader makes destructive choices, we could ask: what are they afraid of? What did they learn about safety and power that makes them believe this is the only way? That doesn’t excuse the harm, but it’s the only question that leads anywhere different.
When we notice the patterns repeating, in families, in systems, in nations, we could choose to break them instead of defending them as inevitable.
We won’t. Not most of us. Because it’s hard, and the story is already written, and everyone expects us to know our lines.
But some of us might. Some of us might start telling different stories. Might ask different questions. Might treat people’s lives as things that matter in their specificity, not in their symbolic value.
That’s not idealism. That’s just the bare minimum of what connection actually requires.
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