The Modern Mythmaker Aaron Nichols

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The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism. There are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of disbelief towards all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement.”
-Teddy Roosevelt
I re-watched a documentary this week that’s got me FIRED UP. It’s called Finding Joe (and it’s free on Youtube).
This documentary brings together big names like Rashida Jones, Sir Ken Robinson, and Mick Fleetwood. Famous, influential people, telling the story of how Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey set them on their hero path.
It’s one of the most emotional and moving things I’ve seen. You’ll be fist-pumping and ready to step out and claim the day by the end, I promise.
The action scenes are acted out by children, which brings a delightful air of innocence, helping us remember the part of ourselves that needs the most love (and is often the most repressed).
“We have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”
-Joseph Campbell
The Hero’s Journey, if you’re unfamiliar, is a pattern for understanding life and human struggle that American Mythologist Joseph Campbell called attention to in 1949.
He talked to thousands of people around the world before publishing this runaway bestseller.
He captured lightning in a bottle, writing something that thousands of people felt a kinship with because the human struggle is nothing new.
In his fantastic six-part interview with Bill Moyers, Joseph Campbell quotes the Quran:
“Do you think you shall enter the garden of bliss without such trials as came to those who passed before you?”
I love that quote. It reminds me of the Rocky Balboa speech. “It ain’t about how hard you hit, it’s about how much you can get hit, and keep moving forward. How much you can take, and keep moving forward.”
Life has been hard from the beginning, since we were scrambling for scraps as hunter-gatherers.
Why would it be different for us now?
There is only the choice, every day, to say yes or to say no to life.
Of course it’s hard. It’s good because it’s hard. There will always be pain and challenges. What matters is what you choose to suffer for. If you make the right choice, you can get up and fight over and over and over again.
In Finding Joe, Robert Walter (president of the Joseph Campbell Foundation), outlines the three choices we face as human beings:
* Surrender to victimhood
* Give in to fundamentalism
* Take responsibility for your own hero’s adventure.
The first two choices represent saying no to life. The last one is the only one that matters. Let’s dig a little deeper:
Choice 1) Surrender to victimhood.
This is a common choice, and it’s the one that means lying to yourself the most. The external forces that act on us can easily give us the illusion that we have no agency, no choice over how we live our lives.
Guess what? There are things you can control, and things you can’t. You can control your level of effort. You cannot control other people and how they respond to you.
You can control the news feed on your phone. You cannot control the news.
There are a massive amount of things you cannot control. Billions and billions of things. This does not make you a victim. It makes you a human being like the rest of

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“It means,” said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation.”
C.S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.
I grew up reading The Chronicles of Narnia, and continue to re-read this fabulous 7-book series every few years as an adult.
Every time I return to Narnia, I learn something new and re-learn something I need reminding of. The many lessons I’ve taken from these beautiful stories include:
* How important it is to remain childlike in the face of the world’s nihilism.
* The power of taking the leap of action vs. overthinking to the point of paralysis.
* The power of a well-developed imagination and sense of creativity.
* The untold power of “Deeper Magic.”
Today, I want to talk about Deeper Magic.
In The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, Aslan claims “Deeper Magic” is the reason he is able to resurrect when the White Witch kills him.
(Spoilers, if you haven’t read this book yet, it’s a whole Christian metaphor).
Deeper Magic is something mysterious that has been in Narnia since its creation, protecting and nurturing.
Turns out, we have something exactly like that in our world today!
There’s magic between us all
If there wasn’t magic binding us together, we would have died off a long time ago.
There’s something primal, woven into the fabric of life, that guides the world even when we’ve gone astray.
We cooperate and build things without being told.
As early humans, we set ourselves apart by our ability to cooperate and communicate using our minds, our greatest strength. When we were first starting out as a species, cooperation was the most important thing in the world.
Without it, the harsh world around us would have killed us off.
We wouldn’t have been able to raise our young into adulthood.
Nobody was striking out on their own, trying to “find themselves” as an individual so they could laugh from the top of the mountain at those who hadn’t. They needed their tribe!
This is why banishment used to be a punishment, even though it feels laughable to us now (personally, I think we should bring it back, just for the comic relief of banishing people from modern cities for littering).
It’s a silly idea now. “You’re going to banish me from San Francisco? I’ll just go live in Portland!” You won’t be eaten by wolves on the way.
Back when we had to cooperate, however, banishment meant almost certain death. You didn’t have your tribe to protect you.
You also didn’t have time to sit around wondering if you were happy, thereby reminding yourself that you weren’t. The needs of the tribe took precedence over the needs of the individual.
That’s Deeper Magic.
Whenever two human beings cooperate instead of doing something selfish, they are being guided by something deeply primal that’s been there since the earliest humans stepped out of the caves.
Nothing would exist without human cooperation
After we came out of the caves, we started discovering bigger and better ways of agriculture that helped us start building bigger and better cities.
Eventually, there was a resource surplus. Fast forward a few thousand years to the rich world, and we are running around at the second or third level of Maslow’s hierarchy, with our basic needs met, totally miserable.
Why? Because we’ve stopped looking to our community for love and belonging and started looking to ourselves, creating impossible-to-fulfill challenges.
We are SO beyond privileged past anyone in human history to even have the concept of self-help.
But it’s flawed.
When we aren’t happy, we look at ourselves. When we have crises, we think that strength means finding our way out of the dark by ourselves.
This is against the Deeper Magic o

This last summer, I was lucky enough to work in five different Alaskan villages.
They taught me a few things that absolutely shocked and humbled me.
I’d love to share those lessons with you today.
Let me know what you think of today’s episode in the comments below!


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewelllivedlife.substack.com

My 3 rules for learning from anyone:
* Find people different from you
* Ask them what it’s like to be them
* Listen to their answers without judgment, and ask clarifying questions.
The absolute opposite of this?
A mistake I made last year that I’m calling the “cardinal sin of cultural exchange.”
Do not:
Go into a new situation with a new culture full of ideas fueled by your own “research” and assume that you already know what you’ll learn from them.
Let me explain.
This past summer, I was lucky enough to work as a summer camp coordinator for kids across five remote Alaskan indigenous villages. 
There is no frame of reference for understanding how remote these communities are if you’re a human being who lives in a place connected to roads. 
These villages are only accessible by small planes. The flights are canceled all the time. Surrounding them is hundreds of miles of swampy, barely walkable tundra.
The tribes that live in these villages drive four-wheelers around on raised boardwalks because there are no cars.
They hunt, fish, trap, and forage for the majority of their food supply.
I’ll be writing more about this experience in the coming months. For now, let’s focus on my mindset going in.
Before I left, I couldn’t wait to talk to the tribal elders
I thought I was going to learn all sorts of amazing spoken wisdom from the elders of these tribes.
Because of reading books like Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions, I thought that I was going to meet tribal elders who spoke in flowing, poetic sentences that would immediately improve my life.
I talked to lots of elders while I was out there. When they talked, which was not often, do you know what they talked about?
Salmon, moose, and berries.
And the level of availability of salmon, moose, and berries available presently as opposed to the amount of salmon, moose, and berries that they’d been able to find in years past.
In the beginning, I had the audacity to be frustrated that I wasn’t hearing the type of “wisdom” that I wanted. Then, I listened to an interview with the Anthropologist Wade Davis, who laid out the error of my ways beautifully.
Cultural understanding to the rescue
If we truly believe that all humans are equal, that means that every culture carries the same capacity for genius and depth of understanding.
“If you took all of the genius that allowed us to put a man on the moon and applied it to an understanding of the ocean, what you would get is Polynesia.”
-Wade Davis
The Western world applied that genius to scientific thought. But cultures all over the world applied it in different ways.
The Yupik people (the indigenous group I was lucky enough to be hosted by) came of age in an unbelievably harsh environment.
Because they were nomadic until relatively recently, they didn’t produce great works of literature or giant works of art.
They were busy surviving in one of the hardest climates on earth.
The lesson wasn’t in their spoken wisdom.
The lesson was in appreciating just how amazing it was that they knew what they knew. That they were so in touch with their environment.
In letting the fact that they survived in that harsh wasteland blow my mind, and appreciating that.
Not trying to color the experience with my own agenda.
We need to listen to each other
In the post-covid world, we’re splintered into a million different echo chambers.
We’re all on different algorithms, and we barely ever find time to interact with people different from us.
In the political realm, this creates a lot of shouting.
When we meet someone who disagrees with our belief system, we spend all our time judging them for what they believe and trying to overwhelm them with our own opinions.
Every person who’s not you has grown up with a different set of values, surrounded by different people, doing different things.
They haven’t arrived at all of the same conclusions as you, because how could they? They grew up in a totall