This week I turn fifty, and I've been asking myself what fifty years of questions actually adds up to. Not a set of answers handed down to me, but conclusions I've reasoned my way to, a few hopes I hold more loosely, and a clear sense of which is which. Season 3 of Reality Inverted is me laying all of it out.

In this first episode, I explain why. For most of history, our deepest stories about who we are ran on fear and obedience: be good, or else. For a growing number of people, that "or else" has lost its hold. Two stories have mostly taken its place. One says we're accidents in a meaningless universe. The other pulls us into tribes, with all the fear and obedience of the old religions aimed at the other side. They look like opposites, but both assume we are fundamentally separate.

I believe there's another way to see it, one that rests on reason and on experience you can check for yourself, and that arrives where the wisest teachers did: love your neighbor as yourself, because at the deepest level, your neighbor is yourself.

In this episode:

• Why the "or else" stopped working, and what replaced it
• Why the stories we live by shape how we treat each other
• The season's ground rule: what I hold as conviction, and what I hold as hope
• Where the season is headed, and how it leads into my upcoming book
• A simple practice to try before the next episode

This season is also an invitation. I've done most of this thinking alone, and I don't think that's enough. If something here stirs a question or a disagreement, I want to hear it.