Narrative Strategy: Meaning Making and Making Things
Or how a philosopher's daughter survives capitalism
When I was a junior in high school, I took a class called Ethics for Pop Culture—or something close to that. We watched episodes of The Simpsons and applied each week’s philosophy lesson to the cartoons on screen: utilitarianism, Kant’s categorical imperative, and eventually ontology. It was the first time I encountered the language of existence in a formal way. We debated questions like “Does God exist?” and tried to understand how people build logical arguments about reality itself.
What made those ideas feel unusually accessible was that the learning continued at home. My mom, a professor of religious studies, could make ontology feel as straightforward as baking a cake. Between conversations about dinner and how my day had gone, we would end up debating existence, morality, and meaning with the zeal of sports fans—despite being nothing of the sort. I was getting a steady diet of philosophical inquiry, even if I did not yet understand what to do with it.
By the time I graduated high school, I had decided to leave philosophy behind. It seemed impractical, all mind exercises and hypotheticals, interesting but irrelevant to making a living. I wanted something more tangible, more lucrative, more obviously useful. Philosophy, to my younger self, did not look like the path of a breadwinner.
That anti-intellectual phase did not last very long. Even while working in more commercial corners of storytelling, I kept gravitating toward projects that were trying to wrestle with something real. I found myself drawn to serious film work—stories about sexual violence on college campuses, about histories people preferred not to confront, about the kinds of subjects that force you to question the world you live in. Unintentionally, I had found my way back to the same terrain philosophy had opened for me in the first place: meaning.
Meaning making is one of the most powerful things humans do. And storytelling is one of the primary ways we do it. We use stories to explain ourselves, our institutions, our values, and our sense of what is possible. We use them to organize reality. That, in part, is what drew me back to ontology—not simply as a philosophical framework, but as a way of understanding how categories, relationships, and assumptions shape what a culture accepts as real.
I became increasingly interested in the stories that structure public life: the stories that normalize harm, narrow possibility, and determine what people are willing to see. Why was it still acceptable to say “don’t get raped,” as though violence were a personal scheduling error rather than a social failure? Why did we speak about slavery as if it were safely concluded, rather than an ongoing force with afterlives in the present? I became interested in how stories do more than describe reality. They organize it.
That curiosity eventually led me to the way ontology is used in computer science: as a framework for structuring data, relationships, and processes. I was struck by the parallel. Philosophy asks how reality is categorized and understood. Computer science asks how information is structured and made usable. Storytelling, I realized, was doing something adjacent. Stories also create structure. They define actors, relationships, causality, stakes, and outcomes. They are not just expressive. They are architectural.
That realization changed the way I worked. I stopped thinking about storytelling as something ornamental—as messaging added at the end—and started thinking about it as infrastructure for creation. When a new idea needs to become real, it does not move forward on logic alone. It needs meaning. It needs a narrative frame that helps people understand why it matters, what it changes, and why it should exist at all.
This is what I began building: story structures that could help turn abstract ideas into tangible outcomes. A game for infectious disease control. Applications to improve medication adherence. New ways of experiencing healthcare. Again and again, I found that before something new could be built, it had to become legible. It had to feel coherent, compelling, and worth pursuing. Meaning came first. Then design. Then prototype. Then execution.
That is the foundation of how I came to narrative strategy. If I wanted a new product, policy, organization, or initiative to exist in the world, I had to do more than describe it. I had to help create the conditions under which other people could recognize its value and participate in making it real. Storytelling was not decoration. It was the mechanism through which possibility became shared, actionable, and concrete.
What began as philosophical debate eventually became professional practice. Those early questions about existence and meaning turned into frameworks for teams, tools for alignment, and strategies for building new things in the world. My mom still likes to tease me that I found a way to make philosophy pay the bills. She is not wrong. Narrative strategy, at least as I practice it, is one way of translating meaning into outcomes. And even when meaning making sounds too abstract for corporate settings, it becomes easier to defend when it delivers results.
For anyone who loves philosophy, or the humanities more broadly, I hope this offers some encouragement. There is pressure everywhere to dismiss meaning as indulgent and intellectual life as impractical. But meaning is not a luxury. It is often the thing that makes action possible. You do not need to build ontologies to survive capitalism, but I do believe this: thoughts become things when meaning attaches to them. Storytelling is one of the ways we make that attachment possible. And in a world defined by constant disruption, meaning remains one of the few forms of stability we can still create for ourselves.
If you’re building something new—a product, initiative, or organizational shift—and need help shaping the story that helps it land, send me a note. This is the kind of work I do with clients, and I’m always open to the right conversations.