When I was a small child, I loved fairy tales. My Aunt Essie would read to me Jack And the Beanstalk, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, Pinocchio, The Three Little Pigs, The Boy Who Cried Wolf and The Little Engine That Could. Then when I could, I buried myself into John Henry, Jonny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan and Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
I loved the creative stories. I could picture ogres, castles, giants and princes. I learned the lessons and embraced the “moral of the story”.
In my grade school and high school years, I was an avid fan of Science Fiction, Westerns, Mysteries and Detective genres. As an adult, I focused on nonfiction books on sales, marketing, entrepreneurism, business and self improvement.
Throughout all of my life, I read newspapers, was culturally literate, and was well versed in “conventional wisdom”. I never stopped learning the lessons and “moral of the story”.
It wasn’t until I hit my 40s that I realized how much I’d learned was all “fairy tales”.
- God has a plan (not for me)
- Hard work and honesty will be rewarded (maybe)
- Pull yourself up by your bootstraps (if you’re lucky, a few mentors will help you)
- Good guys win, Bad guys eventually lose (really? What about Trump, Epstein, McConnell, Chainsaw Al, etc?)
- God (and Santa) see everything (not my experience)
Today, I see even more false beliefs ranging from political ideologies, to marketing influenced dogma, to superstitions, falsely drawn conclusions and commonly spouted “wisdom”.
Stories about marriage, living happily ever after, keeping up with the Joneses, voting, consuming, earning, and opportunity are all fairy tales – except they no longer have interesting characters from hundreds of years ago.
And for me, they are not entertaining.