How should I live? Socrates called it the examined life. The Daoists called it the Way. Every philosophical tradition worth its name has some version of it, which tells you something. This question isn’t optional. It’s baked into what it means to be human.
I was listening to Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning on my walk into town this afternoon, heading to Tesco to pick up a few things. I listened to chapter one, Maps of Experience. Already, it feels like one of those books you don’t just read. You go into it.
His opening move is deceptively simple. We don’t experience the world as a bunch of objects. We experience it as a field of meaning.
A chair isn’t just a physical thing with weight and structure. It’s something to sit on. Something in the way. Something that belongs to someone. Something that defines a corner of a room. The meaning shows up first. The “object” comes later, when we deliberately shift into analysis.
That sounds obvious until you follow it all the way through.
If meaning comes first, if the world we actually live in is a world of significance rather than just things, then how we make meaning isn’t some optional add-on. It’s the central question. And the tools we’ve built for that, myth, religion, story, and ritual, are not primitive versions of science waiting to be replaced. They answer a different kind of question. One science doesn’t even try to answer.
Peterson is making an epistemological point, not a theological one. Science asks how things work. Myth asks how you should act in relation to them. Those are different categories.
You can understand the neurochemistry of grief and still have no idea how to grieve. You can explain the evolutionary function of courage and still not know how to be brave. A map of mechanism isn’t a map of meaning.
What mythology carries, across cultures and millennia, is behavioural wisdom. Not the kind you can fully capture in neat propositions. The hero who descends into the underworld, faces the monster, and comes back changed is as precise a description as we have of how real change works. You go into the unknown. You face what’s there. If you make it back, you bring something with you that matters, not just for you but also for others.
The hero’s journey isn’t just a story template. It’s a map of territory every one of us has to cross at some point.
I’ve spent over twenty years working at the level of story, with people trying to rewrite the scripts running their lives, often without realising those scripts are there. What I keep seeing is this. Transformation doesn’t happen in the rational mind.
You can understand a story is false. You can trace where it came from, see what it’s costing you, and even describe a better version. And still stay stuck. Understanding sits on the surface. The story runs deeper.
Peterson is giving me the theoretical scaffolding for what I’ve been seeing in practice. Myth is where the code runs. Reason mostly skims across the top. Which is why you can’t just think your way into a different life. You have to work at the level of story.
This is where Friedrich Nietzsche comes in. He saw, maybe more clearly than anyone, what was at stake when the West started dismantling its mythic foundations in the name of reason.
“The death of God” is a cultural diagnosis. The framework that held meaning together for centuries was losing its grip. The stories were no longer landing in the way they needed to.
They still existed. The language was still there. The symbols were still in circulation. But something in the relationship between people and those stories had shifted. They were no longer inhabited in the same way. What had once organised perception, behaviour, and value from the inside began to feel external, optional, even arbitrary.
The structure remained in place, but the felt reality that gave it force had thinned. And once that happens, a framework can persist for a long time in form while quietly losing its ability to orient action.
The framework doesn’t disappear just because you’ve stopped believing in it.
Peterson touches on this almost in passing, but it deserves more attention. The idea that human beings have inherent worth. That truth matters, not just strategically but morally. That history has direction, that actions accumulate, that things tend somewhere. These are not scientific facts. They are inheritances. Mythic ones.
The code is still running, whether you’re aware of it or not.
Nietzsche saw the consequence. You can’t keep the fruit while cutting the root. Eventually the structure underneath inherited morality collapses. What fills that gap is not reason. Reason is good at taking things apart. It is not good at building something to live inside.
What tends to rush in is ideology, a partial map pretending to be the whole territory. The twentieth century gave us more than enough evidence of that.
This is what Peterson is pointing at when he contrasts the hero with the ideologue. The hero goes into the unknown willing to be changed. The ideologue goes in with conclusions already fixed and forces everything to fit them. One updates the map. The other defends it.
I’ve been orbiting these ideas for a long time, from different directions. Carl Jung and archetypes. NLP and deep structure. Chaos magick and the idea that belief is something you use, not something you have to commit to permanently.
Underneath it all, the same question keeps returning. Why do these ancient stories still hit? Even now. Even for people who have rejected the systems that produced them. Why does the hero going into the dark still land in the chest like recognition?
Peterson’s answer is clean. Those stories describe the structure of experience itself. The known and the unknown. Order and chaos. Mapped territory and the edges where the map runs out.
Every life moves through that terrain.
Myths are the compressed record of how to do it. They were carried forward because they worked. Because the people who knew how to move through that landscape made it through. The others did not.
Story is not just how we communicate meaning. It is how we hold it.
Peterson has spent thirty years mapping this from inside the library. I’ve spent twenty-odd years mapping it from inside the room. Different routes, similar conclusions. That kind of convergence is always interesting.
So I’m going in.
I don’t know yet where it will lead. The best thinking rarely ends up where you expect. I’ll write as I go. Follow the thread rather than pretend I already know the destination.
If this is your kind of terrain, the questions that don’t sit still, the place where mythology and the problem of how to live turn out to be the same thing, come along.