The Ultimate Hidden Truth of Life

The origin story of this series...

It's exhausting being human these days.

We're told our nature is greedy. We're told competition is the primary force governing our affairs. We're told that life is suffering. 

Everywhere we look—in books, in media, even in fiction—humans are painted as destructive, selfish, a virus on the planet. We're destined to either exploit or destroy each other and our natural world.

If that weren't bad enough, we're told that nature itself is cruel and competitive.

But what if the core of we’ve been told about human nature and life was wrong?

For me, this began changing  when I stumbled on several thinkers and researchers such as David Graeber, Rutger Bregman, Merlin Sheldrake whose work challenged this idea—books that reexamined human nature through history, science, and anthropology. And I came to a startling realization:

We’ve been sold a story about ourselves. And it's wrong.

Humans aren’t naturally greedy or destructive. We are curious, cooperative, fun-loving, and deeply empathetic. The problem isn’t who we are, but rather the systems we live in—the economic structures, technologies, and ideologies that have shaped our world in ways that embed exploitation and harm into nearly everything we do.

We’ve misdiagnosed the root causes of our world's ills. It’s not human nature that’s the problem—it’s the narrative we’ve accepted about ourselves.

During this journey, I also came to a deeply profound and related realization, a potential answer to the age old question—which force dominates in life and human affairs: competition or cooperation?

I summarize this argument in a short essay called The Ultimate Hidden Truth of Life.

All this got me thinking...and wondering...and asking many questions about our civilization and what could have been:

• What if humans didn't stray away from nature?
• Better yet, what if we played an active role in making the natural world better?
• What if our civilizations had evolved alongside the living world instead of against it?
• What if, instead of conquering nature, humans had become a keystone species—one that actually enriches ecosystems?

These questions became the sparks that ignited the world of Dinya!

IMAGINING A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT WORLD

For hundreds of thousands of years, almost all humans have lived in harmony with nature. There have been societies that have even enhanced their ecosystems. A deeply interesting question became lodged in my mind: what if we took some of these societies and fast-forwarded time thousands of years in the future?

For hundreds of thousands of years, almost all humans have lived in harmony with nature. There have been societies that have even enhanced their ecosystems.

A deeply interesting question became lodged in my mind: what if we took some of these societies and fast-forwarded time thousands of years in the future? What would such a world look like?

That lead to more questions.

What if humans hadn’t spent centuries extracting from nature, but growing alongside it? What if humans had developed the living world, biology and ecology, as the foundations of an advanced "technological" society instead of the non-living world? What if their cities weren't made of glass and steel but were massive living ecosystems, their tools not inorganic but alive, and their entire way of life was built around symbiosis rather than domination? What if, to paraphrase a famous quote, their ecology was sufficiently advanced enough to be indistinguishable from magic?

That is the world of Dinya.

A STORY, NOT A LECTURE

Of course, I didn’t want to write a book that simply talked about these ideas.

Instead, these ideas form the foundation of the world and magic system of Rivin & The City Spinners' Secret.

The characters don’t sit in classrooms learning about ecological harmony or cooperation vs. competition. Instead, they live it—through their adventures, friendships, rivalries, and discoveries. They experience a world where:

• Magic isn’t about control—it’s about connection.
• The most powerful forces aren’t spells, but relationships—with each other and with the living world.
• Imagination isn’t just fun—it’s how the future is built.

Through Rivin’s journey, readers explore big ideas—our relationship with the natural world, the false narratives we’ve been told, and the possibility of a different kind of future—not through lectures, but through exhilarating quests, quirky characters, and epic games.

At its heart, Rivin & The City Spinners' Secret is a celebration of human potential—a story that dares to imagine what it would be like if not only humans weren't the problem, but if we became a key conduit through which the natural world reached unbelievable heights, levels of richness, and complexity.