site banner

Wellness Wednesday for January 11, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

4
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I'm thinking more and more I want a tribe, but as a grown-ass adult, everyone seems so atomized, I don't know where to look.

What I mean by a tribe is: a group of people with common identity who meet over and over again non-competitively to accomplish a shared goal. Traditionally, this would be foraging food, but we obviously don't do that anymore. Defecting from a tribal group ranges from forbidden to frowned on. I think this type of group is ideal for human, or at least my, happiness.

Examples that persist in modern society:

  • Military units

  • Musical bands / performance arts troupes

  • School classes, especially if there are collaborative projects

  • Sports teams

  • Creative development teams (eg indie games studios)

  • Informal groups of neighbor parents who take care of each other kids. This lasts while the kids are still young.

  • Advocacy groups and volunteer groups.... sometimes. The ones I've been in don't feel like tribes because there's no shared rituals or pressure about backing out.

  • Church.... sometimes.

  • Work, but very rarely. For the most part everyone is gaming work for maximum personal gain, and are competing with their coworkers for resources, so it's not a tribe.

Am I mising any? Are there ways to predict which volunteer groups, churches, and working environments will be tribal rather than atomistic?

It sounds like what you're looking for is, first and foremost, a family. Family is the ultimate common identity; cohabiting and working together to maintain a household is the ultimate meeting and shared goal. Defection is deeply disapproved. This type of group is ideal for human happiness in all but the edgiest of edge cases. Even your example of "informal groups of neighbor parents" is a step or two removed from just having a bunch of kids and grandkids--which is, of course, what "tribe" largely connotes (plus or minus a degree of consanguinity here and there).

Such groups pose some threat to both the idealized atomism of contemporary liberalism and the apotheosis of government that rests at the heart of contemporary collectivism, so the fact that families continue to exist at all strikes me as strong proof of their being rooted in human biological reality.

If you haven't already got a close knit family, then making one takes a lot of patience and the cooperation of at least one other person--a spouse. In my experience, the most functional "ready made" tribes are probably church communities, due to the ease of joining and the (usually) clear conditions for good standing. Churches (provided they are not progressive-oriented churches) are also often good places to find people who value traditional family-style tribes, thus increasing your chances of finding a spouse, if you haven't already got one. The other groups you named can also function in this way, but you run the risk of being accused of misusing the group (workplace romances are often discouraged, people may complain that they didn't join the band/team/advocacy group to get hit on, etc.). But if you're not personally religious, of course, faking it for the benefits is also often frowned upon.

One thing that isn't explicitly on your list is just hobby groups, like board game groups or rationalist meetups. Another, perhaps less healthy version would just be "drinking buddies"--or, I suppose, some kind of organized crime (like a gang), if we're looking to make an exhaustive list.

But if it's at all possible for you, I personally do highly recommend the project of raising a bunch of children.