Myths You Should Choose To Believe

Meaning, Boredom, and the Stories We Live By

Are all myths bad? I’ve now published seven chapters of my upcoming book, Ten Myths of Progress, dissecting the ideological scaffolding of modern civilization. My aim has been to expose the stories we tell about growth, technology, development, and the rest not as facts, but as myths… constructed narratives imposed by a dying culture to justify its destruction. They are dangerous myths precisely because they masquerade as truth and because they are imposed.

But this meditation, the one you’re reading now, is not about those toxic myths.

It’s about another kind of myth entirely. It’s the myths that have been lost. The kind that tethered people to land, to each other, to seasons and spirits and symbols. These myths weren’t dictated, nor did they force some sense of “progress.” Instead they existed to teach us how to belong… to place, to each other. Through these myths, we learned to see with new eyes of understanding.

In pondering writing this, it struck me that anything we associate with “meaning” itself is a myth. And that’s not a dismissal. It was more of a revelation. I realized it’s something we ultimately choose to see or not see. Often meaning is associated with arising out of our thoughts and feelings, but as we will see, our choice of myth can also shape our thoughts and feelings.

And, as I’ve learned, we need it.

Prelude: The Myth We Are In

Last week something changed for me. No, I didn’t win the lottery. But this is better.

Like most people, work isn’t a choice for me. Not the day job anyway. Yes, my writing is a choice because it ignites passion in me. But the 8 hour shift? Well frankly it can be a drag. Hell, I’d love to quit the job for writing and content creating full-time. But that’s not the reality at the moment.

So I drag my butt to work most days. This week, however, something changed. I approached it differently. I was at work, doing what I do most days: accompanying a person with a developmental disability through the rhythms of daily life. Tasks that repeat, movements that circle back on themselves. There was nothing novel about that day.

Then something shifted. I had this idea to mythify my life. I wasn’t just “at work” going through the motions anymore. I decided I was on a quest. My companion was no longer just a person in my care. I decided he is an oracle, a kind of guide, a mythic teacher. The birds we saw on our walk? Omens. The breeze through the trees? A whisper from something old and wise. Even how many steps I walked, how much water I drank, the way I prepared my food had become part of a living, breathing story. I had given my day a myth. And in return, it gave me joy and meaning.

It was enchantment in the true sense: re-entering the world as if it were alive and speaking, because it is if you listen right. All I did was change the story.

Myths, Puzzles, and Boredom

A few days ago, I sat across from my therapist and confessed something simple but persistent: I’m often bored at work.

I’m a caregiver. It’s a job rooted in patience and repetition. And while I love the human being I support, and see the grace and necessity in the work, there are still hours where I feel out of place, like I’ve wandered into a life that doesn’t quite fit.

My therapist nodded. “That’s pretty common for people with ADHD,” he said. “You’re wired to solve puzzles. You need novelty, challenge, layers. If everything’s handed to you, if there’s no edge to climb or mystery to unravel, you’re going to start drifting.”

That struck a chord. I thought of the story told by Alan Watts called The Dream of Life. Imagine, he says (and I’m paraphrasing here), you could dream any life you wanted. At first, you’d choose pleasure, power, romance. Then, once that became predictable, you’d add twists… danger, surprise, risk. You’d experience everything you’ve every dreamed of experiencing. But eventually, you’d dream the dream you’re dreaming now: this life. This body. This ordinary day. Because what we really seek isn’t endless comfort… it’s meaning. And meaning, it turns out, is inseparable from mystery.

There’s research backing this up too: studies show that people who have dramatic positive or negative changes in their lives return to their emotional baseline after about six months. Whether you win the lottery or lose a limb. The spike in joy or despair fades. What remains is the structure of their inner world, and indeed the story they’re living by. That’s what shapes their ongoing sense of fulfillment or lack thereof.

And that brings me back to boredom.

Boredom might seem like the absence of stimulation, but really it’s the absence of imagination. Not that you are incapable of imagination if you are bored. It’s that you haven’t chosen imagination. This comes when life stops feeling like a question. When it feels like there’s nothing left to discover. Not in the task, setting, or in yourself.

But when I began telling a different story, re-casting my day job as a sacred quest, and treating clouds and birds and sidewalk cracks as omens, then everything changed.

I was still doing the same work. But I was no longer bored. I was paying attention.

What I’d done, without realizing it at first, was craft a personal myth. I gave my life a narrative arc, gave mundane acts symbolic weight. And I wouldn’t say this is to escape reality. It is to re-entered reality through a different door.

And here’s the thing: it worked.

Because the difference between a dull day and a sacred one isn’t the mundanity of the tasks we must do, it is the tale we choose to tell about it.

Gamifying the Sacred

The other day I realized I was feeling like that Pink Floyd song, “Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day… frittering around… waiting for something or someone to show you the way.” I’m sure you’ve felt it. Waiting for something meaningful to show up, to disrupt the monotony. Waiting for life to feel like a story.

Then I thought… why not write the story myself. I went to film school! I got this!

Instead of escaping like we all have into a tv series, video games, RPGs, fantasy worlds, I thought why not turn my life into a game. Not to trivialize it, but to consecrate it. To recognize that I already lived in a world full of symbols, quests, mentors, and mysteries. I’d just been trained not to see them that way.

So I began crafting a living myth.

Each day, I gave myself a series of quests and collect experience points (XP). I figured out a system of points and how to level up. Simple stuff like drinking water with a pinch of sea salt and a squeezed lemon, eating a wholistic meal, walking 10,000 steps every day scored points. Sounds silly, but the points just serve as self-recognition that I was playing my role in my story. That these small tasks were not chores, but rituals.

I started collecting little talismans as I walked… like an acorn or a leaf. I assigned a power to each. Plus 1 to strength. Or a healing blackberry.

Then I started looking for omens. Here’s where things get weird and interesting.

I did a grounding exercise and saw a turkey vulture circling overhead. The Turkey Vulture is a sacred cleaner, a symbol of transformation, death, and rebirth. A perfect omen for a man shedding old skins. I sketched the bird in my little journal, making note of my interpretation. I made it into a sigil of my transformation.

Then there were the 10 crows who flew away when I came by.

Or the new path that the person I support chose on walk. At the end, we discovered to trees with delicious apples. He taught me without saying a word that if he could choose new paths, so could I… and there’s good fruit in wait.

Or the rat I literally saw sitting on a fence, just before I was about to make a difficult decision.

Then something very frustrating happened.

After a morning walk I returned to find my vehicle had been broken into and a backpack stolen. What was I going to do with that? What’s the symbolism? I decided it was test by trickster spirits to see whether I anchor worth in possessions or in the journey. The lost backpack and clothing? The shedding of skins before entering a new chapter. A forced offering to the trickster spirits, making space for intentionality about new gear. And all of this was call to better security culture in my life.

I marked the occasion with a drawing in my journal, making note of the symbolism and the story I was seeing in it.

I could go on and on about more stories, but I’ll spare you. Suffice to say my journal is getting way interesting. It’s not just a space for venting or noting thoughts… it’s like a great story now, full of insights.

Again, Justin hasn’t checked out of reality. I just needed to reframe it. To step outside the industrial mindset that tells me life is a sequence of tasks leading to productivity. I needed to remember that life can also be a dream, poem, and a spell.

The sacred isn’t something you go find. It’s what you name in what’s already here.

And when I did this, starting naming the sacred, I stopped feeling bored. I stopped feeling like a worker clocking hours. I became a traveler in a living world, with choices that mattered and moments that glowed.

And the magic wasn’t in the rules or the points. It was in the attention. Also intention. To live not just through each day, but within it.

The Surrogate and the Sacred

There’s a critique I’ve wrestled with. One I’ve even internalized.

That all this with the point systems, quests, omens is just a distraction. A surrogate activity, as some philosophers have put it. A way to pass the time in a world stripped of real purpose. That maybe, like so many others, I’ve simply exchanged one illusion for another.

But truth be told… in a culture that has severed us from land, from community, from the sacred, everything risks becoming a surrogate. Work. Entertainment. Even “self-improvement.” In a world where survival is bought with currency, not cooperation, and where most of our needs are mediated by machines, the natural impulses for challenge, contribution, and belonging often have nowhere to go.

And so they leak out sideways into obsessions, compulsions, and consumerism. Into endless scrolling. Into lives that look busy but feel vacant.

But what if a surrogate becomes sacred?

That’s how this has felt for me. Not as a distraction from meaninglessness, but as a rebellion against it. A conscious re-enchantment. A refusal to let a machine world define what counts as “real.” A way of re-opening the channels of perception that industrialism numbs.

I’m rejecting the dominant myths that tell me my worth is tied to productivity, that sacredness is reserved for Sundays or temples, that nature is scenery and time is money.

I’m choosing to live by a myth that says the world is alive. That I am part of a great unfolding, even in my quietest hours. That my life is not a waiting room for some future reward.

So yes, I see the risk of self-delusion. But I also see the deeper risk of mythlessness. Of becoming so detached, so skeptical, so “rational,” that nothing means anything at all.

And between those two, I’ll take the risk that fills my life with wonder, attention, and care.

Toward a Myth Worth Living

So here I am.

Still working the same job. Still navigating boredom some days. Still facing the slow grind of a civilization that doesn’t care whether the world is alive, only whether it can be mined, sold, or optimized.

But I’ve begun living by another myth. One where the companion I care for isn’t a detour from my purpose, but part of it. One where the wild isn’t just out there in the forests I love, but it’s here, in every moment I choose to make meaningful.

And this myth isn’t just personal. It’s political. It’s a rejection of the sterile narratives we’ve inherited about growth, domination, control, and a movement toward something older and truer.

What we need is a reemergence of the myths of reciprocity, mystery, and care.

Because if meaning is a myth—and it is—then the question becomes: Which myth will you live by? Not what’s true in the scientific sense. But what’s alive in the relational sense. What makes your life more awake, more attentive, more embedded in the breathing fabric of the world.

The thing is… you are already living a story. The only question is whose.

Here we are in this collapsing empire, and maybe the way out is a better myth. One that brings us back into relationship. Back into the wild. Back into the day we’ve been given, with all its quiet symbols and sacred puzzles.

A myth worth living.