It’s a Thursday evening. You walk into a kitchen that smells delicious, bringing your favorite dish you cooked at home. Five people look up, and one of them has already set a place for you. Your phone goes in the basket by the door.
Someone lights a candle. Around the table, each person names one thing they need this week and one thing they can offer. You mention your mother’s surgery on Tuesday, and before you’ve finished the sentence, someone says, “I’ve got your kids that afternoon.” Someone else needs a ride to the airport. You can do that.
No money is exchanged here, and everyone shares responsibilities equally. Last week two of you disagreed about how to run the volunteer project; tonight you’re laughing about it. You spend time simply listening to one another share your lives. After dinner, the six of you pack up the extra lasagna and walk it down the street to the family with the new baby.
Notice what happens in your body as you picture it.
That’s what it feels like to be fed, not just by food, but by people who expect you, know you, and need what you bring.
For many of us, that table is missing. Without it, life gets heavier. Ordinary days feel exhausting. There’s no one to call in a hard week. Asking for help feels like weakness.
In a 2025 Ipsos survey of 31 countries around the world, 56% of respondents said the society they live in is broken. In the United States, 66% of respondents felt the same way.
It’s true that something is breaking. But it’s not us. It’s a story that no longer serves us.
I learned firsthand about the power of story after serving six years as a military communications officer and then getting an MBA. I realized people were using slide software like paper in a typewriter rather than frames of a storyboard, then I wrote a few articles about it.
The new concept quickly spread and turned into my first book Beyond Bullet Points, which granted me access to boardrooms and courtrooms where the highest-stakes decisions are made.
My big “aha” moment came as I sat with a group of successful lawyers in the war room on a hot July day in Houston.
We were brainstorming ways to explain to jurors the epic battle between a big company and our client whose husband had been killed by their actions.
Someone mentioned that jurors liked the detective show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.
Within seconds, I created a slide with the letters CSI on a black background and showed it to the team. Eyes went wide and furrowed brows turned into smiles.
Together we had stumbled on a new way to explain the case that went something like: “You in the jury get to be like detectives. You get to examine the evidence and figure out what killed Bob. Just follow the three big clues…”
The jurors awarded a $253 million verdict. They didn’t want to sit back and watch another war. They wanted to lean forward into a mystery they could participate in solving.
It took me 20 years to realize this wasn’t technically a new story, theme, or reframe. CSI was a highly compressed piece of culture code: an abbreviation, word or phrase that automatically unzips certain types of story structures and scripts of behavior below our conscious awareness.
CSI became a culture code after years of a successful run of the popular television show that reinforced a particular type of procedural story sequence, the use of scientific investigation techniques, and a satisfying conclusion.
In that Texas courtroom, those three simple letters unzipped an entirely new world, transforming the way the jurors saw the case, interpreted the evidence and how they acted in deliberation.
Although the verdict was later reduced and reversed, it contributed to a $4.8 billion settlement by the defendant to resolve similar lawsuits.
We don’t usually think we can change our shared reality with just a few letters or words.
This is just one example that we can.
With that power in mind, it’s time to focus our attention on a particular line of culture code that affects every one of us on the planet personally, and question whether it is working for us anymore.
It’s the phrase Survival of the Fittest.
The historical origin of the words doesn’t matter as much as how you use them in your everyday language to give meaning to something you’ve seen, felt or done.
The code tends to automatically unzip in specific phrases like:
“I am on my own.” “If I don’t beat them, they’ll beat me.” “They got what they deserved.” “That’s the way the world works.”
These are more than words in our minds; when they arise they then guide our thoughts and actions, and determine how we treat one another and ourselves.
Through this familiar line of code, the same Thursday dinner looks different:
Two people didn’t show up tonight because of the unresolved conflict from last week. Another is guarded because other groups broke their trust and it’s not easy to give or receive freely. The airport ride and the lasagna are outsourced to paid apps. Nobody agrees to meet again next week, so the weekly dinner falls off the calendar. The next Thursday evening, everyone is alone scrolling on their phones.
Notice how that feels in your body.
The measure of whether a story works or breaks is if it leaves you nourished or depleted.
To compare, try the different phrase Survival of the Closest.
It’s a new line of culture code I’ve edited to compress our current scientific understanding of human biology, that goes like this:
Humans are built to carry life together. Our brains count on a handful of close people the way our bodies count on food. When we are nourished by one another, we get things done more efficiently, effectively, and meaningfully.
The scripts of this new code unzip automatically in different phrases like:
“I’ve got you.” “We’re in this together.” “I can count on you and you can count on me.” “I’m curious how we can find common ground.” “We’re greater than the sum of our parts.”
If this new culture code works, it means our bodies can take a breath. We can relax a moment. We can begin to put down some of what we’ve been carrying alone. And we gain more capacity to see what’s been happening as the old story runs the show behind the scenes.
When those handful of people on Thursdays are missing in our lives, everything costs our bodies more. Survival of the fittest justifies this as normal, so we explain away the mismatch between our culture and our biology by blaming ourselves for not being stronger as we valiantly struggle to do a group job alone.
The worst part is, we begin to think there’s something wrong with us. But in fact there’s nothing wrong with us; we’re just following a culture code that puts us in a painful dilemma we can’t resolve:
We are surrounded by people and price tags, yet starving for something money can’t buy.
How did we get so hungry, with no way to explain it?
In the Amazon, people who grew a nutritious root vegetable called bitter manioc developed a days-long recipe to remove its natural poison.
When the crop spread around the world, it often traveled without the full recipe, and the harm came slowly, years later.
Something similar may have happened to us.
Markets, money, and technology brought enormous gifts, and we came to rely on them for more of what neighbors once freely gave and received.
The goods arrived, and we happily paid for them. The recipe for carrying life together didn’t always come with the transaction.
We have been telling the stories of survival of the fittest that mean making it on your own. But for most of human history, the fittest were the closest.
We briefly lost track of the biological recipe of interdependence that made the cultural concept of independence possible in the first place.
No one is to blame. And you don’t need to know how you got hungry to start eating. The recipe isn’t gone.
Survival of the Closest is a practical recipe for setting that table again, starting with six people agreeing to share a meal one night a week for six weeks.
Fed people feed people.
The neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett said:
“Sometimes we are responsible for something not because we’re to blame but because we’re the only ones who can change it.”
I hope you join us here as we take responsibility for the most important words that shape our worlds.
Let’s choose the culture code that works for us and delivers the nourishing human connection we need, one table at a time.