We’re living in an age of information, a time in which the best decisions are data-driven. It all sounds quite reasonable, and even progressive, in a clinical sort of way.
There’s just one problem: This data-driven world is making human beings miserable.
Since the advent of the digital revolution, rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide have increased. Income and benefits have gone down while time spent working has risen. The Quantified Self movement has brought us a decrease in both physical and mental health. We’re more isolated lonely than ever before.
A data-driven approach to living, it turns out, only address the factors in our lives that can be easily quantified. So, in the process of digitally optimizing our lives, our most human longings have been dismissed as irrelevant.
It’s time to re-infuse our lives with the qualities of mystique, myth, and meaning. These are the qualities that are expressed, figuratively, in fairy tales.
What counts as a fairy tale? It isn’t necessary to for there to be fairies as characters for a story to count as a fairy tale. Instead, there needs to be an element of fae, the marvelous glamour associated with fairies, also known as awen, in the telling of a story. Outright magic isn’t required, but some element of fantastic transformation, heroic dedication, or elegant wonder is.
We need to take the time to tell fairy tales again, to both children and adults, to reacquaint ourselves with the ancient tools for building lives that are purposeful as much as they are productive, as enchanted as they are efficient.
Fairy tales help us organize what we know in terms of what matters. They access the most powerful parts of our minds, the engines of metaphor that operate below the level of conscious logic. These stories are not literally true, but they contain figurative patterns that enable us to grasp deeper truths.
Facts matter, of course. We must depend on the methods of science and reason to construct realistic and effective lives.
Human life, however, can never be fulfilling when it is merely realistic and effective. There are no such things as fairies, and that is why we must tell stories about them.
International Tell A Fairy Tale Day is an occasion to exercise the more fanciful side of our personalities. It’s a holiday on which we share allegories, to remind us how to lead lives with magical sensibility, even if magic is in a literal sense not real.
Above all else, Tell A Fairy Tale Day is a time for human voices. It’s a time for people to share stories, human to human, rather than relying on computer generated mass media for drama. Fairy tales connect people to each other in a way that clicking “like” on social media never can.
Tell A Fairy Tale Day takes place on February 26 every year, but you don’t need to wait for the holiday to come around to prepare for the celebration. If people are going to tell fairy tales, then fairy tales need to be written. The old ones are great, but we also need new fairy tales, told in new ways, that reflect the struggles of our own time.
That’s why we’re asking people to submit their own original fairy tales, as well as retellings of old fairy tales, to be included in a new book of Fairy Tales for a Digital Age.
Find out how you can become part of part of this project.