Are We All Sleepwalking Toward Self-Destruction?

Why Humanity Needs a New Story to Survive

For the past year, I’ve been deeply immersed in researching and writing about our self-image. If you don’t know, our self-image is the unconscious story we carry about who we believe we are, what we deserve, and what we’re capable of. This internal identity, shaped early in life and reinforced as we grow, silently controls how we experience the world, what we accept, what we expect, and what we unconsciously repeat.

If you want to know more about updating your self-image, check out this post Self-Image Secrets: How to Break free from Self limiting Beliefs HERE

Then a powerful realization began to grow in me:

What’s true for individuals is also true for humanity.

And, with what is going on in the world right now, there are many reasons as to why Humanity needs a new story in order to update its self-Image.

Updating Humanity’s Self-Image

Just as each of us lives inside a personal self-image, shaped by early influences and buried beliefs, humanity as a whole is living inside a collective self-image: a shared story about what we believe it means to be human.

Imagine if that story was updated to focus on the highest potential of the human race and the human experience:

That humans are creative, smart, cooperative, creative, and capable of great empathy.
That power can mean integrity.
That there is abundance for all and everyone can succeed;
That strength can look like compassion.
That progress doesn’t require sacrifice, but must include more consciousness.
That conflict can be met with wisdom and compromise, not war.
That for most people, being human could mean growing and evolving, not just surviving.

But that’s not the story most of us inherited.

Instead, the long held narrative tells us things like:

People are selfish or they cant be trusted.
Power is about control.
The wealthy and privileged deserve more (and should horde it)
Competition is necessary.
Domination is strength.
We solve our problems through war and violence, and so,
Taking a life becomes acceptable and for some, a default process.

This collective narrative defines what we believe is possible. It tells us what we must protect ourselves from. And it quietly shapes what we believe we’re allowed to want.

Humanities Outdated Self-Image

But here’s the problem:

Humanity is still running on an ingrained survival-based operating system, one that was built in an much earlier time, under different threats, for a different world.

And in a similar way that a personal self-image can keep someone stuck in cycles of pain, limitation, and fear, our outdated collective identity is keeping us trapped in destructive patterns that are now threatening our very existence.

Despite incredible advances in technology and science, we remain stuck in cycles of judgment, violence, domination, scarcity, fear, and blame. We keep creating the same problems, but now we are doing so with tools capable of planetary-scale consequences.

War, climate collapse, technological overreach, and nuclear weapons are all unfolding without a shared ethical compass. And now we have added unregulated use of A.I. to the mix.

Why? Because we haven’t upgraded the internal operating system running underneath it all: our collective story about who we are or who we believe we are and what it means to be human.

The Conditioning We Mistake for Truth

Most people don’t realize that like their self-image, their worldview was unconsciously adopted long before they had the ability to question it. Not because they did anything wrong, but because that’s how being human works.

As children, we absorb the world through emotion, repetition, and relationship. Beliefs about love, safety, power, and worth are formed not by logic, but through experience, often before language, and certainly before we master discernment.

We take in our environment like sponges, internalizing whatever keeps us safe, accepted, or emotionally fed, even if those patterns are dysfunctional, distorted, or deeply limiting.

And here’s the issue:

We grow up treating this internal conditioning as if how we see ourselves and the world around us is the truth. As if our mental programming is simply “the way the world is.”

But its really important that you understand this, it’s not truth, it’s a story.
And that story is now being manipulated.

The digital landscape has become a battlefield for our attention, identity, and emotional reactivity. Just like the sugar industry once engineered addiction, today’s technology platforms are designed to hijack your mind—and your sense of self.

We are unknowingly being programmed to see ourselves and each other through distorted lenses such as fear, division, scarcity and in the process far to often mistaking manipulation for truth. And most of us are actively participating in this process.

We fixate on distractions like Trump vs. Biden, left vs. right, Musk vs. the media and it appears the working man, vaccines vs. anti-vaxxers, or climate change debates… while the real issue goes largely unnoticed As the outdated collective mindset and the story we still live by silently manipulates our lives.

What makes these divisions even more dangerous is that we do not share a common framework for how to interpret them. People aren’t just disagreeing, they’re living in completely different realities, shaped by the unconscious programming they’ve inherited.

We argue as if our beliefs are objective truth, unaware that we’re filtering the world through stories we didn’t consciously choose.

The Hidden Programming Behind Global Chaos

The evidence is everywhere:

Nations use economic threats to dominate rather than collaborate, reinforcing division.
Hard-won gains in social services, science, education, and civil rights, many of which evolved after World War II in various parts of the world, are now being eroded in some regions, replaced by misinformation, polarization, and creeping authoritarianism..
There’s a global war on truth, where more and more often propaganda or conspiracy theories overwhelms facts, and opinions become evidence.
50% or more marriages end in divorce, not from lack of love, but from a lack of tools to navigate and heal unconscious beliefs.
Wars echo the same old patterns of control, fear, and extraction.

For more information on our current crossroads you can check out this excellent video, “The World is at the Crossroads of the Most Serious Crisis in Modern History by Global research HERE

These are not isolated issues.
They are symptoms of one root issue:

Humanities deeply wounded & outdated collective identity is running the show.

Just like individuals with unhealed trauma, humanity keeps repeating its history, because we haven’t examined the hidden programming beneath our choices. But just like individuals, humanity can’t evolve until it becomes aware of the unconscious story it’s living by

Are We Humans Sleepwalking Toward Catastrophe?

What frightens me most is that we tend not to change until we’re forced to.

On a personal level, I’ve seen many people awaken only after a serious crisis—an illness, a financial collapse, or a divorce powerful enough to shatter their worldview and force them to grow.

On a global level, the pattern holds: war, genocide, or collapse must often occur before humanity begins to question its deepest assumptions.

How Chaos Can Drive Change

Many countries made powerful changes after World War II, as they collectively reflected on the horror, destruction, and inhumanity that had unfolded. Out of that reckoning came a series of moral and structural shifts:

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948.
The United Nations was established to promote diplomacy and global cooperation.
Public health systems and social safety nets expanded to reduce suffering and protect the vulnerable.
Access to education increased and was recognized as a basic right.
Women’s rights gained traction, laying the groundwork for greater gender equality.
The welfare state emerged in many nations, providing support for housing, healthcare, and unemployment for those in need.
Racism and authoritarianism were more directly confronted, especially after the Holocaust and decolonization movements.

For a time, it seemed we had learned something.

Why Humanity Needs a New Story

But today, many of those hard-won gains are being dismantled:

In some places, Human rights are eroding, with rising authoritarianism, surveillance, and censorship.
Democratic institutions are weakening, and trust in science and journalism is declining as is evidenced in the backlash by some regarding vaccines .
Public health and education systems are underfunded and increasingly privatized.
Wealth inequality is soaring while corporate consolidation accelerates.
Women’s rights are being rolled back in some nations.
People are buying many items online, which requires shipping and packaging while ignoring the costs to the environment vs supporting local businesses
Nationalism and tribalism are replacing global cooperation with suspicion and division.

It’s as if we’ve forgotten the lessons history taught us, lessons learned at such a high cost.

Must we really wait for World War III? For climate collapse? For mass extinction to wake up?

Right now, we are a species with 21st-century tools… still operating on prehistoric programming. Few people understand they are driven by beliefs, many which were adopted unconsciously.

The Good News – A New Story Is Possible

Despite everything, I remain hopeful.
Some might call that naïve, but I’ve seen the power of personal transformation.
I’ve watched people break free from limiting beliefs, rewrite their internal stories, and create lives they once thought were impossible.

And what’s true for individuals… can also be true for humanity.

Imagine a world where:

Leaders are trained in emotional intelligence, not just influence and control
Children learn how their minds and emotions work, and how to shape and update their beliefs consciously
Communities are built on empathy and collaboration, not fear and competition
Success is redefined, not by wealth or dominance, but by contribution, growth, and well-being
We stop waiting for catastrophe to force transformation, and choose it instead

This kind of shift won’t come from new policies or better tech.

It will come from within each of us.

The Revolution Begins Within Us

The most radical act available to us right now isn’t protest or policy, it’s consciousness.

True change won’t begin in parliaments or boardrooms.
It begins with you.

Are you willing to pause and ask: Is the story I’m living truly mine, or is it inherited, or defensive unconscious programming?
Are you brave enough to examine the beliefs driving your reactions, judgments, and fears?
Are you ready to challenge what you’ve been taught it means to be human?
Are you committed to upgrading your inner operating system, so you can help evolve our collective one?

Because every time someone rewrites their internal story, they create a ripple.
Well, Enough ripples become a wave.
And that wave can change the course of history.

Not through force.
Not through blame.
But through awareness.
Through responsibility.
Through conscious evolution.

and the best part?

You don’t need to have it all figured out.
You just need to start paying attention.

Because the moment you become aware of the story running your life, you begin to reclaim your power to change it.
And as more of us begin this inner work, we help humanity wake up from the trance of unconscious programming.

This isn’t about being perfect.
It’s about being awake.

It’s about choosing to become more conscious of the patterns guiding your choices, so that together, we can shift the patterns guiding our world.

Where to Begin: How to Wake Up in a World That Profits from You Being Unaware

You don’t need to understand every layer of unconscious programming to begin resisting it.
You just need to start noticing, and reclaiming your attention, your emotions, and your choices.

Here are some small but powerful ways to do that:

Notice emotional spikes and outrage triggers. If something in the news or on your feed makes you instantly angry or afraid, pause. Ask: Is this really about what I think it is, or am I being played? Emotional manipulation is one of the most powerful tools of mass control.
Cut back on digital consumption that drains you. Social media, clickbait news, and rage-driven content are designed to keep you reactive, not reflective. If something consistently makes you feel worse, it’s probably not informing you, it’s programming you.
Be extremely selective about what you let into your mind. Every post, headline, video, and conversation shapes your internal world. Ask: Is this feeding clarity and compassion, or confusion and division?
Start questioning the narratives you’ve inherited. You don’t have to rewrite your entire worldview overnight. Just pick one belief, about success, power, humanity, or even your own identity, and ask: Where did I get this? Is it still true for me?
Replace passive consumption with conscious input. Trade 15 minutes of scrolling for something that grounds you: silence, nature, creativity, music, or a real conversation. You don’t need to go offline entirely, just stop letting the feed think for you.
Remember: unconscious programming thrives in distraction. The more present you become with your thoughts and feelings, the harder it is for outside forces to hijack them.

These are small shifts. But they are also acts of rebellion in a system that profits from your unconsciousness.

The more you reclaim your mind, the more you weaken the grip of the story that’s destroying us.

This Is the Moment We Rewrite the Story —Together

Humanity is standing at a crossroads, one hand on the wheel, the other holding a device designed to distract us from the cliff ahead.

If we don’t wake up soon, the story we’ve been living will write the ending for us.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

We have the tools. We have the insight.
What we need now is the will, and each other.

No one can rewrite this story alone. It takes all of us. This isn’t just a personal journey, it’s a collective calling.
– To rise in awareness.
– To reconnect with what makes us truly human.
– To stop reacting from fear and start responding from consciousness.

This is humanity’s turning point.

And your awareness is part of what tips the scale.

So ask yourself, What role will I play in the new story we must write?

Because the future of our species may depend on how many of us awaken in time.
Especially if the path we’re on leads not to renewal… but to another world war, one that could be the end for way too many people.