In 1949, Joseph Campbell listened to the stories humans have always told, stories of rupture and repair, of loss and return. And as he sat with myths and fairy tales, with films and legends, he noticed the same pattern repeating itself time and again (Campbell, 1949). It shimmered in children’s stories about magic and mystery, in films with caped heroes soaring across screens, and in sweeping space operas set among the stars.

Joseph called this pattern the hero’s journey. And no matter how magical or epic the story became, it always started in the same, familiar place: the ordinary world. (Vogler, 2007)

The Ordinary

At first glance, the ordinary world seems plain, almost forgettable. It’s the small town before the dragon, the farm house before the road beckons, the suburban home before the unexpected. But it holds more meaning than we realize.

The ordinary world is where life appears orderly and intact. It’s predictable and steady. The rules are clear, so we know how to move through it. And yet… this is also the place we feel the tug of absence. Something essential is missing.

But we can’t quite see it, not yet, because it’s tucked out of sight by our adaptations, our compliance, and our determination to make life work in this world, no matter the cost.

That’s where every hero’s journey begins. And it’s where mine began, too.

Doing Everything Right

From my earliest days in school, my good grades were met with warm smiles from teachers. When I brought them home, they softened the worry in my parents’ eyes. So I told myself: This must be the way to a good life. Then, I gave it everything I had.

It was days spent in classrooms and nights spent with textbooks. The years slipped by inside the reliable loop of effort and reward. All along the way, there were smiles and applause, people lifting glasses in my direction and offering steady encouragement: *You’re doing it right. Keep going. This is the way to a great life. *That life, I was told, was always just ahead, one more grade, one more semester, one more degree away.

After 25 years of steady striving, every box was checked. I stood at the long-promised summit after decades of climbing. But alone in my corner office, tucked deep inside an esteemed university, I paused and let my eyes wander across the horizon of my life. And in that still, calm moment, I saw it.

The life I’d been promised, one filled with meaning, closeness, and the feeling of home, wasn’t waiting for me here.

So I stepped away from my tenured faculty position, not as an act of rebellion, but because another voice had been calling me all along. It had been whispering, patiently, gently, and now it was finally clear enough to hear. It told me that what I was longing for would never be found inside success, because it didn’t live there at all. It lived between us, in shared presence, in shared life.

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I went back to school, dove into psychology, and began the deep work of sitting with people, bearing witness as a therapist. And it was there, in those gentle hours, that a much larger story started to emerge.

A Story Too Large to Ignore

Over the next 25 years, I sat with more than ten thousand individuals, couples, and families. Each life looked different, each story carried its own shape, but beneath them all was the same ache rising: I did what everyone asked of me. I worked hard. I lived right. Why am I so tired? Why am I so alone?

And it wasn’t just happening in my office.

As more and more people reached out, each carrying some version of the same ache, it became clear that this was bigger than anything I could hold on my own. So I grew my practice into something larger. Within six years, I was founder and CEO of Colorado’s largest outpatient counseling organization, bringing together more than two hundred clinicians and fifty support staff.

From that vantage point, overseeing the work of hundreds of clinicians reaching tens of thousands of people a year, I saw something both sobering and unmistakable. I watched the same story repeat itself, again and again, across a quarter million lives, across generations and communities: exhaustion, loneliness, and the weary ache of striving without ever arriving. And I wasn’t the only one noticing this quiet crisis (U.S. Surgeon General, 2023).

That’s when a truth settled in. These are thoughtful, capable, caring human beings faithfully living the life they’d been taught, achieving, producing, accumulating, and quietly paying for it. I recognized the cost. I’d paid it too.

They had done what was asked of them: followed the rules, played their part, and, still, something was missing. Life was incomplete. Joseph Campbell recognized this as the moment the hero’s journey must begin.

A Journey Hidden in the Ache

I set out to discover how we arrived here, in an ordinary world that leaves us exhausted and alone, and to trace the path our shared hero’s journey must take if we’re to find our way forward.

I already understood people’s inner workings through psychology and neuroscience. And when I widened the lens to include anthropology and sociology, the story of what led us into this* ordinary world *came sharply into focus. For millions of years, human life unfolded within villages, and our brains evolved inside that shared world. They became wired for closeness, connection, and belonging. Then, in a remarkably short span of time, almost suddenly, that shared life began to erode. In its place came a culture that asked us to manage alone, to shoulder by ourselves what had always been carried together. And in that shift, we were separated from the very thing we were made for: each other. (Dunbar, 1998; Cozolino, 2014)

And just as this insight came into view, so did the path our hero’s journey must walk. It’s not a road of endless striving and tireless fixing. It’s a softer one, paved by stillness, compassion, and the restoration of human connection. It leads to a way of living in the modern world that remembers who we truly are, and carries us to a place I call the village.

So stay with me over the next several essays. Each one stands alone, but together they form a single unfolding hero’s journey: not a journey of conquest or achievement, but a journey of return… a return home to the village.