The Stories We Live Inside Of

Every human being lives inside an orienting story. Often invisible and rarely questioned, this story shapes what we notice, what we value, what we believe is possible — and even what we take to be real. The Stories We Live Inside Of introduces students to the concept of worldview: the deep operating system through which we interpret experience. The course begins from a powerful premise — worldviews and worlds shape one another. The beliefs we inherit generate the institutions, technologies, and cultures around us, and those structures in turn reinforce the worldview beneath them. Recognizing this dynamic is both liberating and demanding. If there is no single, unquestionable worldview handed down from on high, then we are responsible for examining and choosing our fundamental assumptions with care.

This course begins by exploring what worldviews are and how they function. Through historical case studies — indigenous cosmologies, classical philosophy, early modern scientific materialism, and postmodern pluralism — we trace how different worldviews generate distinct kinds of worlds. These frameworks are not treated as abstract theories but as living lenses that shape law, education, economics, spirituality, and identity. Along the way, students learn how dominant worldviews often become invisible precisely because they are widely shared, quietly structuring perception from the inside.

In the second half of the course, we turn toward the challenges of life in a pluralistic society where multiple worldviews coexist, overlap, and clash. What does it mean to think and speak across these differences with clarity and respect? How can we recognize our own assumptions without collapsing into relativism? Students practice identifying their own foundational beliefs and interrogating them thoughtfully. They learn how to evaluate worldviews — not in search of a final, perfect system, but in search of coherence, generativity, and ethical depth.

A central insight runs throughout the course: there is no unmediated access to reality. We always encounter the world through interpretive filters. When those filters go unexamined, they steer our choices and shape our futures in unconscious ways. And if we attempt to change society without addressing the worldview foundations of our institutions, we often recreate the very patterns we hoped to escape. The Stories We Live Inside Of empowers students to become conscious participants in shaping the narratives that shape them — and, in doing so, to help imagine and inhabit more life-giving worlds.