Tribe Theory 101: The Anatomy of Trust - How Strangers Become a Tribe

 

In the previous posts in this series, I've explored flourishing, languishing, The Ache, and the importance of cultivating healthy communities that can serve as safe harbors when life gets difficult. But there's a pretty significant problem with this idea. We can't simply gather twenty strangers in a room, give them a common purpose, call them a tribe, and expect them to develop the kinds of relationships that make a genuine safe harbor possible. We can give them matching shirts, shared rituals, inspirational slogans, and a grand mission, but none of those things guarantees that they'll actually give a damn about one another.

Something FAR more important has to happen. They have to learn to trust one another.

We could use a lot of metrics to measure what is and what is not a "tribe." Our most useful metric might be trust. Simply put, the higher the collective trust among members, the stronger the bonds of the tribe.  

Trust is arguably the most important ingredient in a functioning tribe. Without it, meaningful cooperation becomes difficult, honest communication becomes risky, and mutual protection becomes little more than an empty promise. People may participate, socialize, and accomplish things together, but they'll remain guarded, always wondering whether the people around them will actually come through when it matters. Or stab them in the back. 

A community without genuine trust might be pleasant, productive, or even exciting. But it won't provide the dependable relationships that make a safe harbor valuable.

Importantly, members of a group who can't trust each other dramatically limit their potential for growth and development. In other words, you cannot progress if there's no trust. In fact, a lack of trust is usually one of the easiest, most reliable methods of indentifying languishing communities and/or poor leadership. 

So how do we actually build trust? That's one of the central questions I've spent years trying to answer while developing Tribe Theory. Specifically I wanted to know things like how to keep our gym members safe, how do we create enough psychological safety for students to learn, or how to trust strangers leading us deep into the back country running trails. 

Figure out how to build trust and you figure out how to build flourishing tribes. Figure out how to build flourishing tribes and you figure out how to make the world a better place. Figuring that out started with two questions.

Two Questions That Change Everything

Imagine you're hiking through the mountains with a group of friends. Someone slips on a steep section of trail and needs help getting back to safety. You look around at the people accompanying you. Who would you trust to help?

That question really contains two separate questions: 

1. Can you? 
2. And will you?

"Can you?" is a question about capability. Does this person have the knowledge, skills, judgment, and composure necessary to help? Can they perform competently under pressure? Can they recognize their limitations and avoid making a bad situation worse? Someone might desperately want to help, but good intentions won't magically give them the ability to do so.

"Will you?" is a question about care. Does this person genuinely value your well-being? Are they willing to make a reasonable effort on your behalf, even when helping you is inconvenient? Will they tell you the truth, respect your boundaries, and consider your interests when making decisions? Someone might possess extraordinary capabilities, but those capabilities aren't particularly reassuring if they have no intention of using them to help you.

In practice, trust also requires evidence of dependability. Someone can possess both capability and good intentions yet repeatedly fail to follow through. Circumstances, priorities, and limitations matter. What we're ultimately trying to determine is whether someone can be relied upon to act appropriately when we're vulnerable to the consequences of their decisions.

Really, we're answering the question "Will this person have my back when it matters?"

Think about the people in your own life. You probably know individuals who are incredibly competent but aren't particularly trustworthy. You may also know wonderful, caring people who simply lack the capability to help in certain situations. And if you're fortunate, you know a few people who combine competence, genuine concern, good judgment, and a demonstrated willingness to follow through.

Those are the people who make a safe harbor possible. Those people are your Tribe.

You know you can trust them because of what thay've done. Not because of what they've said.

Trust Is Built Through Evidence, Not Promises

Modern life is pretty interesting. We spend an extraordinary amount of time surrounded by what I call "cheap signals of trust."

Companies announce that their employees are family. Organizations promote loyalty, integrity, teamwork, and mutual respect. Social groups create impressive identities, membership requirements, and elaborate traditions. Leaders deliver emotional speeches about having one another's backs. And social media allows us to broadcast our compassion, generosity, and moral character to hundreds of people simultaneously.

But how much of that tells us whether someone will actually be there when we need them?

Not much.

Talk, after all, is cheap.

These signals aren't necessarily dishonest. Shared values, organizational identity, and public commitments can communicate useful intentions. The problem comes when we mistake those declarations for evidence of actual trustworthiness. A company that calls its employees family but abandons them when they become inconvenient hasn't demonstrated loyalty. A leader who preaches honesty but punishes uncomfortable truths hasn't created psychological safety. A friend who promises to be there but repeatedly disappears when things get difficult hasn't earned the same trust as someone who consistently shows up.

Trust is built by what people repeatedly DO when they show up, especially when doing the right thing carries a cost.

And those costs don't have to be dramatic. Sometimes the most meaningful evidence comes from ordinary behavior: keeping a small promise, admitting a mistake, respecting a boundary, helping someone without expecting repayment, or standing up for another person when remaining silent would be easier.

Over time, these experiences tell us something important about the people around us. We begin to understand what they're capable of, what they care about, and whether their words and actions consistently match.

These signals tell us if someone's really trustworthy or not.

How Trust Grows Over Time

One of the mistakes people make when trying to build close-knit communities is assuming that trust requires dramatic emotional experiences. They organize intense bonding exercises, demand personal vulnerability, or create artificial hardships intended to forge lifelong relationships in a weekend.

Sometimes powerful shared experiences do strengthen relationships. But trust doesn't require extraordinary circumstances. It requires repeated opportunities to observe trustworthy behavior over time. Small actions repeated consistently will always be a more reliable signal of trustworthiness than one grand gesture performed once..

The infographic at the beginning of this post illustrates one possible progression. People begin through repeated interaction. They make small commitments and follow through. They communicate honestly, gradually discover one another's strengths and limitations, and become comfortable with manageable forms of vulnerability. They cooperate when circumstances become challenging, learn how disagreements are handled, and eventually accumulate enough experience to know whether they can rely on one another.

This isn't a rigid seven-step formula. Real relationships develop differently, and trust in one area doesn't automatically extend to every other situation. But the underlying principle is remarkably useful: every interaction provides information about whether trusting someone is justified.

Consider something as ordinary as admitting you made a mistake. In a healthy group, that admission might be met with constructive feedback, appropriate accountability, and assistance correcting the problem. In an unhealthy group, the same admission might trigger ridicule, humiliation, gossip, or punishment.

Which environment would make you more willing to communicate honestly next time?

The choice ain't hard.

People pay attention to these consequences. Over time, we learn whether honesty is genuinely valued or merely advertised, whether boundaries are respected or resented, and whether asking for help brings assistance or judgment. These experiences become the unwritten rules governing how much of ourselves we're willing to bring into a relationship or community. That's why a lack of trust dramatically inhibits performance and growth... we don't give the best we have to offer to those who we cannot trust. 

What This Means for The Tribe of the Fire

This is where the theory becomes practical.

One of our central goals is to deliberately create opportunities for strangers to develop genuine, reciprocal trust. We do this through something we're calling Social Experience Design: carefully structuring meaningful experiences so participants have opportunities to learn, cooperate, demonstrate capability, care for one another, and develop authentic relationships.

Our Group Defense training provides a particularly useful environment for practicing these behaviors. Imagine working with a partner who is learning a difficult grappling technique. You have the ability to overpower them, but instead you adjust your resistance, offer useful feedback, respect their limitations, and help them improve. Later, the roles reverse. You become the less-capable partner, and they have an opportunity to demonstrate the same consideration toward you.

Neither person needs to make a speech about loyalty or friendship. The experience itself provides evidence. And that's an infinitely more reliable signal of trustworthiness than any well-intentioned speech.

Our shared meals and fellowship, which are staples of our events, create different opportunities to develop trust. People learn about one another, exchange stories, share interests, offer assistance, and gradually discover whether they enjoy spending time together. Honest discussions create opportunities to disagree respectfully. Cooperative challenges reveal how people handle frustration, responsibility, and competing interests.

Across these experiences, the same principles are reinforced: capability matters, care matters, and consistent behavior matters. Just as importantly, participation remains voluntary. Nobody should have to reveal intimate personal information, endure unwanted physical contact, or sacrifice their boundaries to demonstrate that they belong.

We're not trying to manufacture friendship or demand that participants trust one another. We're creating an environment where people have good reasons to become trustworthy companions.

What Destroys Trust

Unfortunately, trust can be damaged much faster than it develops. Dishonesty, manipulation, repeated inconsistency, exploitation, gossip, betrayal, and the abuse of authority can transform a previously welcoming community into somewhere people feel compelled to protect themselves. And it doesn't take much for these behaviors to begin undermining the relationships that hold a group together. What makes this especially dangerous is that distrust rarely remains confined to the people directly involved. It can gradually spread throughout an entire organization, changing how everyone communicates, cooperates, and treats one another.

In low-trust organizations, we tend to see twelve recurring patterns of unhealthy behavior. People become afraid to speak honestly (psychological unsafety) and concentrate on protecting their reputations rather than doing what's right (impression management). They form cliques and factions for protection, engage in gossip and backroom conversations instead of addressing problems directly, and become increasingly defensive whenever their actions are questioned. Mistakes produce blame and scapegoating rather than learning, while favoritism creates the perception that the rules depend on who you are. People begin hoarding information rather than sharing it, withdraw their voluntary contributions, and either avoid disagreements altogether or allow them to escalate into personal conflicts. Eventually, repeated disappointments produce learned helplessness and cynicism, followed by emotional disengagement and, when possible, departure. 

The tragedy is that many of these behaviors are understandable responses to the environment. People who once arrived eager to contribute, cooperate, and make a difference gradually learn that the safest strategy is to keep their heads down, their mouths shut, and their expectations low.

Worse, these behaviors can become trapped in three self-reinforcing cycles that make unhealthy cultures extraordinarily difficult to repair. In The Silence Cycle, people discover that honesty carries consequences, so they conceal mistakes and concerns. Problems go unresolved, leadership responds with greater control or punishment, and people become even less willing to speak up. 

In The Distrust Cycle, suspicion causes people to protect themselves and withhold cooperation. Others interpret that defensiveness as selfishness or disloyalty, confirming their suspicions and creating even more distrust. 

Finally, in The Disengagement Cycle, people discover that their contributions go unrecognized, unappreciated, or even punished. They stop volunteering, sharing ideas, and going above and beyond. Performance and cooperation deteriorate, reinforcing the belief that contributing is pointless. They look like this:

These aren't inevitable sequences, but they're plausible patterns that help explain how an organization can become increasingly dysfunctional even when most of its members are decent, capable people. The environment teaches people how to survive within it, and those survival behaviors can eventually become the very culture that makes the environment unhealthy.

Perhaps the most destructive behavior is refusing to accept responsibility when harm occurs. Every human relationship and community will experience mistakes, disagreements, and disappointments. The question isn't whether people will occasionally fail one another. It's whether they can acknowledge what happened, take appropriate responsibility, make meaningful repairs, and demonstrate that something has changed. 

Importantly, distrust isn't always irrational or unhealthy. Sometimes people have perfectly legitimate reasons to stop trusting someone, especially when repeated experiences have demonstrated that honesty, vulnerability, or cooperation will be used against them. Demanding that those people become more trusting without changing the conditions that made distrust necessary only compounds the damage.

Forgiveness cannot be demanded, and not every broken relationship can or should be restored. But communities that make honest correction possible have a much better foundation for sustaining justified trust than those that insist everything is fine while allowing harmful behavior to continue. Rebuilding trust requires more than motivational speeches, team-building exercises, or declarations of shared values. It requires changing the behaviors, incentives, expectations, and power structures that made distrust the rational response in the first place.

This responsibility begins with leadership. If we demand honesty but cannot tolerate criticism, or preach accountability while exempting ourselves from it, then we've failed at the very thing we're trying to teach. The real test of a group's culture isn't what it claims to value. It's what actually happens when someone demonstrates honesty, courage, initiative, vulnerability, or genuine concern for another person. Does the group reward those behaviors, protect the people who demonstrate them, and encourage others to follow their example? Or does it teach everyone that trusting one another is a mistake?

The answer tells us far more about whether a group deserves our trust than any mission statement ever could.

From Strangers to a Safe Harbor

Ultimately, the goal isn't to create a group in which everyone blindly trusts everyone else. That's neither realistic nor particularly wise. Healthy trust is earned, appropriately bounded, and continually supported by actual behavior. Different people will develop different relationships, at different speeds, with different levels of closeness and responsibility.

Importantly, distrustful people who demonstrate an inability or an unwillingness to do the work necessary to build trust or take accountability for their distrustful actions, ultimately, should have no place in our tribes. 

But imagine belonging to a community where people have repeatedly demonstrated that they're capable, caring, dependable, and willing to address problems honestly. Imagine knowing that you can ask for reasonable help without humiliation, disagree without retaliation, and experience setbacks without automatically losing the respect of everyone around you.

That's the beginning of a genuine safe harbor.

And it raises another important question. If trust grows through meaningful shared experiences, what kinds of experiences actually give people a reason to gather in the first place... and keep coming back?

That's where we're headed next. Because bringing people together is relatively easy. Giving them something meaningful to do together, something that gradually builds the relationships and capabilities that make a tribe worth belonging to, is an entirely different challenge.

A tribe isn't created when people agree to call themselves one. It begins to emerge when their actions give one another genuine reasons to trust.

~Jason

***

Tribe Theory 101: The Safe Harbor

 

When life starts to get shitty, where do you go? 

Who do you turn to? 

Who do you trust?

I don't mean the people who you could text or who would react to your post with a sympathetic emoji. Who is the person or group you can show up in front of exhausted, scared, or embarrassed without having to put on a show first? Who are the people who have your back?

If a name or a place came to mind quickly, you’ve got something a lot of people don’t. Cherish those relationships! 

If you had to think hard, or came up blank, this post is for you. And you're not alone.

What, Exactly, is a Safe Harbor?

A safe harbor is a place, made up of trusted people, where you can rest, recover, and be protected when life gets to be too much. In the last post, I intrioduced the idea of our social groups as gardens. Our Safe Harbor is a special kind of garden; a garden that keeps us safe when the rest of the world isn't. Think of a lighthouse at the edge of a storm: the waves are brutal out there, but there’s somewhere to go where you can escape the storm.

But a harbor isn’t just a hiding place. Ships aren’t built to sit in port. A healthy tribe is also a secure base, a stable foundation that encourages you to go out into the world and take on challenges, build skills, take healthy risks, and contribute something meaningful to the world. It’s the difference between a place you hide and a place that supports your adventures.

A Tribe should be a place from which we venture into the world, and a place to which we can safely return.

You need both. Without the harbor, you can’t rest. Without the base, you never leave. Tribe Theory was intentionally designed to understand and teach that method of building our Safe Harbors.

Life With a Safe Harbor

When you have a Safe Harbor, you may not notice it most of the time. That’s kind of the point. It works quietly in the background.

You take risks you might otherwise avoid, because failing won’t cause your life to fall apart. You can say “I’m not doing so great” and have somebody take it seriously instead of fixing it, judging it, or posting about it later. When the storm hits (a lost job, a loss in the family, a marriage in trouble, a medical scare... or whatever shit-sandwich life delivers), you don’t face it alone. Someone listens. Someone helps with a practical problem. Someone keeps you from getting taken advantage of while you’re vulnerable.

That's the Safe Harbor a Tribe can provide.

It doesn’t mean life is easy. A safe harbor is not a life without problems, difficulty, or suffering. It means difficulty isn’t the whole story, because you’ve got somewhere to regroup before heading back out. You have a place to be safe. You have a real home.

Life Without a Safe Harbor

Now picture the opposite. You're surrounded by people all day, at work, online, in your neighborhood, and yet, when life gets difficult, every struggle is yours to carry. Alone. You have hundreds of connections, but nobody you'd feel comfortable calling at 2 a.m. Nobody you trust enough to admit that you're scared, overwhelmed, or barely holding things together. You learn to keep up appearances, carefully hiding the parts of your life that aren't going so well. You become exceptionally good at forcing a convincing smile and saying, "I'm fine." 

And the worst part? Everyone believes you. Nobody asks twice. Nobody notices when you quietly start falling apart. Probably because they, too, are on the brink of falling apart. Such is modern life.

Without a harbor, every storm becomes a crisis, because there's nobody you can count on to help you weather it. Every setback feels like a verdict on your worth, every failure something you have to conceal, every moment of vulnerability a risk you can't afford to take. You become the person who handles everything, not necessarily because you're strong, but because you don't believe you have any other choice. Rest becomes a luxury. Asking for help feels like weakness. And eventually, you stop taking chances, stop reaching out, stop dreaming quite so big. You build a smaller, safer life around the things you can control, because the price of failing without a net is just too damn high.

And perhaps the cruelest part is that you can become so accustomed to carrying everything alone that you forget life could be any different. You mistake isolation for independence, emotional exhaustion for adulthood, and the absence of genuine support for the normal price of being responsible. You don't necessarily feel abandoned. You've simply stopped expecting anyone to show up.

If that sounds like the quiet dissatisfaction I called The Ache in the last post, it isn't a coincidence. The Ache happens when we don't have a Safe Harbor.

Why So Many Communities Fail

Most of us belong to plenty of groups. We have coworkers, neighbors, gym memberships, church congregations, recreational sports teams, professional associations, social media communities, hobby clubs, parent groups, and circles of casual friends. We're surrounded by people who recognize our faces, know our names, share our interests, or depend on us to fulfill some particular role. But how many of those groups are genuine communities of people who know us, care about our well-being, celebrate our successes, and will actually show up when life falls apart? We can belong to a dozen different groups and still have nowhere to turn when we desperately need someone to have our back.

Think about the communities you’ve been part of. Maybe the acceptance was conditional, good as long as you stayed useful, agreeable, or impressive. Maybe it was run by status and ego. Maybe cliques decided who was in and who wasn’t. Maybe drama and gossip made it feel like you were one bad day away from becoming the story. Maybe the group was simply unreliable, great when things were easy, gone when they weren’t. Some groups go further, using fear, manipulation, or exploitation to keep people in line.

And plenty of groups aren’t necessarily toxic, just draining. You leave more tired than you arrived. There’s more pressure than support. Nobody did anything wrong, exactly. The group just wasn’t built to be a place you could rest.

We call these things communities because we don’t have a better word for them. But a collection of people in the same room isn’t a harbor, and a harbor doesn’t happen by accident.

What Tribe Theory Does Differently

Tribe Theory starts from a simple premise: We can deliberately cultivate the conditions that make a community a safe harbor. Tribe Theory doesn’t leave it to chance and hope.

In a Tribe, you’re welcomed without being asked to earn it. Communication is honest and respectful. People support each other during hard times and share responsibility instead of leaving it to a few. There’s room for rest and room for growth. Trust replaces fear as the default culture, and people can count on each other to be reliable.

Notice what’s not on that list: Grand promises. A real safe harbor doesn’t claim it can fix your life, solve your every problem, or rescue you from everything. Trust grows from modest promises that get kept, honest limits about what the group can and can’t do, and a willingness to point someone toward outside help when that’s what’s needed. Reliability within honest limits beats unlimited pledges every time.

And you don’t just receive this. In a Tribe, members grow from beneficiaries into stewards, people who help make the harbor safe for the next person. That’s how a safe harbor becomes self-sustaining. And because you’ve learned how to build one, you can take that skill into your family, your workplace, and your neighborhood. That's how we take this modest idea and use it to really make our world a better place.

So, Where’s Your Harbor?

Before you move on, take an honest inventory:

• Who would you call when everything falls apart?
• Is there a group where you can truly be yourself, without managing how you come across?
• Where do you feel really supported (encouraged, equipped, backed up) instead of just tolerated?
• And on the flip side: Who in your life relies on you to be their Safe Harbor?

If you can answer those, hold onto what you’ve built and protect it. If you can’t, that isn’t a character flaw. It may just mean you’ve been living in places that were never designed to be harbors.

Which leads to the harder question: How do a bunch of strangers become dependable enough to create a genuine Safe Harbor?

That’s what we’ll tackle next.

~Jason

***

Tribe Theory 101: The Garden - Why We Don't Flourish in Isolation

 

Cultivate the Garden

In the last post, I explained the nature of *The Ache* and how that nagging feeling that something is missing from our lives can serve as a signal that we aren't flourishing as much as we could be. Sometimes, that feeling points toward languishing, a condition in which we're getting through life without experiencing the meaning, connection, growth, or satisfaction that makes us feel truly alive. To understand WHY this happens, and more importantly, what we can do about it, I like to use the analogy of a garden.

Imagine two plants of the same species. One is healthy and vibrant, growing vigorously and producing beautiful flowers. The other is struggling. Its leaves are wilted, its growth is stunted, and it barely seems to be surviving. 

What's wrong with the second plant? We might assume there's something inherently wrong with the plant itself, but anyone who has ever grown a garden knows that's not necessarily the case. The struggling plant might have exactly the same potential as the healthy one. The difference could be something as simple as the soil, the amount of sunlight, access to water, or competition with neighboring plants. Put that struggling plant in better conditions, and it might thrive.

Sometimes the difference between flourishing and languishing isn't the plant. It's the garden.

This simple observation has profound implications for how we understand human flourishing. We live in a culture that places enormous emphasis on individual responsibility and personal development. If we want better lives, we're told to work harder, develop discipline, acquire new skills, improve our attitudes, and become better versions of ourselves. 

There's tremendous value in that advice, and personal responsibility remains an essential part of flourishing. But it leaves out something fundamental: human beings don't exist in isolation. We're deeply influenced by the relationships and communities that surround us, and the conditions within those environments can either support or undermine our efforts to grow.

In Tribe Theory, we use the garden to illustrate three interconnected levels of flourishing: The Self, Our Relationships, and Our Tribes. The individual is the plant, with unique needs, capabilities, limitations, and possibilities. Our relationships are the roots and connections through which we experience trust, communication, affection, cooperation, and reciprocal support. The garden itself represents the communities we inhabit, including our families, workplaces, friendships, neighborhoods, and social groups. Each of these levels influences the others. A healthy individual can contribute to stronger relationships, strong relationships can help create healthier communities, and healthy communities can provide conditions that allow more individuals to flourish.

But there's another part of the metaphor that's especially important: The soil and growing conditions. In Tribe Theory, we call these conditions "Social Architecture." 

Every group has a social architecture, whether anyone deliberately designed it or not. It includes the group's norms, expectations, traditions, rules, incentives, leadership, opportunities, and ways of handling disagreement. These factors influence which behaviors are encouraged, which are discouraged, who feels welcome, whose contributions matter, and what happens when someone makes a mistake. Two communities can be filled with equally capable, well-intentioned people and still produce dramatically different experiences because their social conditions are different.

Consider someone who is confident, energetic, creative, and outgoing around friends but becomes quiet, guarded, and disengaged at work. Has that person's personality fundamentally changed? Probably not. In one environment, their ideas might be welcomed, their contributions appreciated, and their mistakes treated as opportunities to learn. In another, honest disagreement might be punished, mistakes used against people, and favoritism rewarded. The person is rationally responding to two very different sets of conditions. This is why someone can flourish in one part of life while languishing in another. 

It kinda looks like this:

We all inhabit multiple gardens, and not every garden provides the same opportunities to thrive.

This distinction also helps explain why languishing and toxicity aren't quite the same thing. A neglected garden might struggle because it lacks adequate nourishment, attention, or opportunities for growth. Nothing is necessarily poisoning the plants; they're simply missing something they need. 

A toxic garden is different. Its conditions actively cause harm, perhaps through contaminated soil or persistent threats to the plants growing there. Human communities work much the same way. A social group might languish because its members rarely connect or accomplish anything meaningful together. Another might be toxic because intimidation, manipulation, dishonesty, or retaliation have become normal. The distinction matters because the solutions are different. A neglected garden may need nourishment, but adding fertilizer won't solve poisoned soil. Sometimes the first responsibility is to stop the harm.

This brings us to the final element of the metaphor: The gardeners. Good gardeners don't stand over struggling plants demanding that they grow. They pay attention to the conditions, identify problems, provide appropriate resources, remove harmful influences, and make adjustments based on what actually happens. 

That's the essence of what we call Enabling Leadership. Rather than simply trying to persuade or pressure people into behaving differently, effective leaders take responsibility for cultivating the conditions in which people can succeed together. They create opportunities for contribution, foster honest communication, establish fair expectations, protect people from unnecessary harm, and encourage the development of trust. Most importantly, they recognize that they cannot force another person to flourish. They can cultivate opportunities for growth, but people must retain the freedom to choose their own paths.

There's an important limitation to the analogy, of course. Unlike plants, human beings aren't passive organisms waiting for someone else to tend to them. We have the capacity to recognize our circumstances, make decisions, develop new skills, challenge harmful conditions, and help shape the environments around us. And we don't have to hold an official leadership position to do it. Every time someone welcomes a newcomer, keeps a promise, offers meaningful assistance, challenges an unfair practice, or helps resolve a conflict, they're participating in the cultivation of their community. In other words, we can all become gardeners.

The gardener analogy contains some powerful wisdom. What happens when we deliberately cultivate a garden in which people not only flourish themselves but also learn how to cultivate better conditions for others? Imagine a community where people develop useful capabilities, establish dependable relationships, practice cooperation, and learn to recognize what makes a group healthy. Now imagine those same people carrying what they've learned into their families, workplaces, friendships, and other communities. 

The benefits wouldn't have to remain confined to the original group. Each person could become better equipped to improve the gardens they already inhabit, creating opportunities for flourishing that extend far beyond the people directly involved. Pay it forward, Tribe-style!

This is one of the central ideas behind The Tribe of the Fire. We're not simply trying to create another social club, self-improvement program, or place where people occasionally gather and have a good time. We're working to create a community where people can experience the conditions that support flourishing, develop the capabilities to help maintain those conditions, and learn how to cultivate them elsewhere. The ultimate goal isn't to build one extraordinary garden that everyone needs to join. It's to help develop gardeners who can make a difference wherever they go by learning the skills required to create great gardens.

When we experience The Ache, our first instinct is often to look inward. We wonder what's wrong with us, what personal weakness we need to overcome, or what we need to change about ourselves. Sometimes those are exactly the right questions. But sometimes we should also examine our relationships, our communities, and the conditions that shape our everyday experiences. And even when things are going well, we can ask how to make those conditions better for the people around us. Flourishing isn't merely the absence of problems or suffering. It's the presence of opportunities for meaningful connection, contribution, growth, and living well.

Don't only strengthen the plant. Cultivate the garden.

If our social environments have such a profound influence on our ability to flourish, an obvious question follows: What should a healthy community actually provide? I believe the answer begins with two things that human beings have always needed: A safe harbor to which we can return when life becomes difficult, and a secure base from which we can venture into the world with greater confidence. In the next post, we'll explore why both are essential, and what it takes to build a community capable of providing them.

~Jason

***

Tribe Theory 101: The Ache

 

In the last post in the series, I explained the spectrum of Flourishing and Languishing, and discussed how that manifests in the three major domains of our existence. In this post, I talk about the signal we often get when we're Languishing, even when things, on paper, seem to be going well.

That Feeling That Something Is Missing

There's a peculiar kind of dissatisfaction that I suspect most of us have experienced at some point in our lives... maybe even right now. It's not necessarily sadness, even though we're sometimed sad. It's not quite depression, at least not in the clinical sense. It's not even unhappiness, exactly, either. It's something more difficult to describe. It's a quiet, persistent feeling that something... important... is missing from our lives. 

Maybe it shows up on Sunday evening when we realize another weekend has slipped away without doing anything particularly meaningful. Not productive, but meaningful. Maybe it happens when we're driving home from work, sitting beside our spouse, scrolling through social media, or lying awake at three in the morning wondering how the hell our lives became so different from what we once imagined. Everything seems fine. We're doing what we're supposed to be doing. But somewhere beneath the surface, there's a nagging sense that life has more to offer than what we're experiencing.

In The Tribe of the Fire, we call this feeling The Ache. 

The Ache is frustrating because ometimes we have absolutely no good reason to feel dissatisfied. At least, that's what the world tells us. We have a decent job, a home, people who love us, enough food to eat, and access to luxuries our grandparents could scarcely have imagined. In our pockets, we carry a supercomputer that should have the answers to every one of our problems. By almost every conventional measure, we should be grateful for how ridiculously fortunate to live in this modern world of safety, comfort, and convenience.

The worst part? We probably are grateful! We recognize our good fortune. We know other people have it worse. We understand that our lives contain plenty of things worth appreciating. But gratitude for what we have and longing for something we're missing are not mutually exclusive. We can appreciate our lives while recognizing that important parts of them aren't what we want them to be. 

And that's okay.

Unfortunately, because that distinction is so poorly understood, we often end up feeling guilty about our dissatisfaction. Instead of asking what might be missing, we conclude that something must be wrong with us for wanting more. And that leads to feeling shame for our apparent ingratitude.

Because we assume other people will judge us for feeling this way, we rarely talk about it. We don't tell our friends that our successful careers have become meaningless exercises in collecting paychecks. We don't tell our families that we sometimes feel profoundly alone, even when surrounded by people we love. We certainly don't tell our coworkers that the organization we've devoted years of our lives to has become a place where we feel increasingly disconnected, unappreciated, or invisible. 

Instead, we smile, make small talk, and assure everyone that things are going great, which we confirm with our social media posts. They do the same. Everyone maintains the appearance of a perfectly satisfactory life, while privately wondering whether they're the only person who feels like something is missing. We've become remarkably good at hiding our dissatisfaction from one another, which makes it easy to believe everyone else has figured out something we haven't.

The Ache Can Come From Different Places

Remember the three levels of flourishing from the previous post? The Self, Our Relationships, and Our Tribes? The Ache can emerge from dissatisfaction in any one of them, and the experiences can feel remarkably different.

Within ourselves, The Ache might feel like restlessness, boredom, stagnation, or a loss of purpose. Maybe we've stopped pursuing the things that once excited us. Maybe we've spent so many years being responsible adults that we've forgotten what it feels like to be curious, adventurous, or genuinely passionate about something. We can become extraordinarily competent at fulfilling our mundane, daily obligations while feeling increasingly disconnected from that person we once wanted to become. We keep promising ourselves that we'll start living differently once we have more money, more time, fewer responsibilities, or some other Utopian condition that never quite arrives. Eventually, we may realize that we've spent years preparing to live a life we never actually got around to living.

Within our relationships, The Ache often feels like loneliness, even when we're not alone. We might have a spouse, friends, family, and hundreds of contacts on our phones, yet struggle to identify anyone who really knows what's happening inside our heads. Perhaps our relationships have become predictable routines instead of sources of excitement, intimacy, discovery, and mutual growth. Maybe we miss the way someone used to look at us, the conversations that used to last until sunrise, or the feeling of having someone who was genuinely interested in understanding us. We may still love the people in our lives, and they may still love us. But sometimes love and familiarity aren't enough to sustain the connection we need. We find ourselves longing not necessarily for different people, but for a different experience of the relationships we already have.

Within our tribes, The Ache can feel like not belonging anywhere that truly matters. We may spend forty or fifty hours every week surrounded by coworkers who know our job titles but almost nothing about who we are. We join clubs, attend gatherings, participate in organizations, and accumulate acquaintances without developing the kind of reciprocal relationships we could depend upon when life gets difficult. We might be surrounded by people who are perfectly friendly, but we can't shake the feeling that we're ultimately on our own. There's a profound difference between being included in a group and genuinely belonging to a community. One means somebody recognizes your name. The other means your presence matters, your contributions have value, and people give a damn whether you're doing okay. When we've experienced that kind of belonging before, its absence can be especially painful.

When and where we feel The Ache can be a little weird. We can experience The Ache in one part of our lives while flourishing in the others. A person with a wonderful marriage and fulfilling personal interests can still languish within a miserable workplace. Someone surrounded by a supportive community can still feel privately directionless. A successful professional with an extraordinary sense of purpose might have relationships that have been slowly deteriorating for years. 

Sometimes these experiences reinforce one another, creating an increasingly powerful sense that life isn't what it should be. Other times, the good parts of our lives help us endure the parts that aren't working. Either way, the source of our dissatisfaction isn't always obvious.

All the Ways We Try to Make It Go Away

Modern life has provided us with an almost endless assortment of ways to avoid confronting uncomfortable feelings. We can scroll through social media until our eyes hurt, binge-watch television, play video games for hours, bury ourselves in work, chase another promotion, argue with strangers on the Interwebz, or buy some new toy we don't particularly need. We can pursue novelty, excitement, sex, alcohol, drugs, gambling, or whatever else offers a temporary escape from the ordinary experience of being ourselves. None of these activities is inherently unhealthy under the right conditions, and enjoyment isn't something we need to apologize for. But...

The problem emerges when we repeatedly use pleasurable experiences to avoid examining a dissatisfaction that never really goes away.

Social media adds an especially strange twist. We can feel profoundly dissatisfied with our lives while carefully constructing online evidence that everything is wonderful. We post curated, lighty-edited pictures of our vacations, accomplishments, relationships, meals, and adventures. Or the gym bod we've been working on since last New Years. We collect likes, compliments, hearts, and little bursts of external validation that reassure us we're doing pretty well. We're certainly not hiding that feeling of a deep dissatisfaction with parts of our life, right?

Meanwhile, everyone else is doing much the same thing. We compare the unedited reality of our own lives with the carefully curated highlights of everyone else's, then wonder why we feel inadequate. Sometimes we're not even trying to convince other people that we're flourishing. We're trying to convince ourselves. And nobody knows how to manipulate us like, well, us.

But the distractions eventually end. The dopamine-induced shopping high fades. The buzz wears off. The phone goes dark. The vacation ends, and Monday morning arrives. Whatever we were trying not to think about is often still there, waiting patiently for our attention. 

We might respond by looking for another distraction, a more exciting experience, or some new achievement or promotoion that promises to make everything feel different. And sometimes those things genuinely improve our lives. But most of the time we're trying to solve a problem without ever understanding what the problem actually is.

What If The Ache Is Trying to Tell Us Something?

The Ache is a signal, not a diagnosis. It doesn’t prove we’re languishing, and it doesn’t necessarily mean something in our lives is objectively wrong. It only tells us that something deserves attention, and the cause could be almost anything: a life transition, grief, stress, a health condition, a shift in our values, or a need that isn’t being met. Sometimes it means we’re growing. Sometimes it means we’re exhausted. Sometimes it points to something that calls for professional help, not a philosophical explanation. And sometimes our lives are pretty damn good, and we’re just curious what else is possible. We can feel The Ache for many reasons, but we should never ignore it.

I think The Ache deserves our attention rather than our automatic dismissal. It's a reason to become curious about the conditions of our lives. We owe it to ourselves and the people who depend on us to take this signal seriously. It should compel us to examine which experiences leave us feeling energized, connected, capable, and alive, and which experiences consistently leave us feeling drained, isolated, powerless, or unfulfilled? 

Think about this: When was the last time you felt genuinely excited about something? When did you last experience the kind of connection that made you feel completely understood? When did you last belong to a group of people who were accomplishing something meaningful together? And perhaps most importantly, what changed between those experiences and the life you're living today?

These are uncomfortable questions, partly because answering them honestly might reveal things we'd rather not acknowledge. That's why people prefer distraction. That's why The Ache never really goes away. 

Maybe we need to change some habits. Maybe we need to have conversations we've been avoiding. Maybe we've invested years in relationships or institutions that no longer provide what we need. Or maybe the problem isn't that we've failed to work hard enough at improving ourselves. Maybe we've been trying to flourish within environments that make flourishing unnecessarily difficult. 

Impossible, even.

That last possibility is especially important, because so much of modern personal development focuses almost exclusively on the individual. We’re encouraged to become more disciplined, productive, resilient, positive, mindful, and emotionally intelligent. There can be enormous value in all those things. 

But consider someone who is capable, responsible, motivated, and genuinely interested in living a good life, yet spends most of their waking hours inside an organization that punishes honesty, discourages meaningful relationships, and makes people feel disposable. How much personal development is required to compensate for those conditions? 

Or consider someone who desperately wants deeper friendships but lives within a social environment where everyone is exhausted, overcommitted, and increasingly isolated. 

What about a married couple who still care about each other but have been stretched so thin that their conversations have shrunk to schedules and logistics. Nothing is dramatically wrong, yet they feel like roommates, lonely in the same house. And they really have to think to remember the last time they had sex.

In each case, is the solution simply to try harder? Is lack of effort really what caused this?

I suspect the answer is no.

I like the saying "When you find yourself in a hole, quit digging." I think it offers a good answer to the "just try harder" trope.

Maybe We've Been Asking the Wrong Question

This brings us to one of the most important discoveries I've made while developing Tribe Theory: The quality of our lives is shaped not only by who we are and what we do, but also by the social conditions in which we live. 

Our relationships, communities, workplaces, social expectations, and surrounding social environments can either create opportunities for flourishing or make those opportunities increasingly difficult to find. We influence these environments through our own behavior, of course, but we're also profoundly influenced by them. Sometimes the answer to a problem really is personal growth. Sometimes it's improving a relationship. And sometimes it's recognizing that the social environment itself needs overhauling.

This is where I believe The Tribe of the Fire offers a different approach, and the basic idea is surprisingly simple. Rather than treating every experience of dissatisfaction as an individual defect that needs to be corrected, we can learn to recognize and deliberately cultivate the conditions that help people flourish. 

We can do this within ourselves, within our relationships, and within the communities we inhabit. We don't need everyone to adopt the same philosophy, share the same beliefs, or pursue the same definition of a good life. Instead, we need to better understand what actually helps people live well, create opportunities for those things to occur, and pay attention to what happens after we implement these things.

But before we can explain how to do that, we need a better way to understand the relationship between people and their environments. And that's the subject of the next post.

For now, I want you to sit with one question: If you've been feeling The Ache, what do you think you've been missing? 

Don't immediately dismiss the answer because other people might think you should be satisfied. Don't assume that wanting more makes you ungrateful. And don't assume that the answer must involve changing everything about your life. 

Just get curious. 

Think about the times you've genuinely flourished, the circumstances that made those experiences possible, and what might be different today if you could cure The Ache.

In the next installment, I'm going to introduce a metaphor that became central to the development of Tribe Theory: The Garden. It's a way of understanding why capable people sometimes struggle, why relationships can flourish or wither, and why the communities surrounding us matter so much more than we often realize.

Because sometimes, when a plant isn't thriving, the answer isn't to demand that it grow harder. It's to take a closer look at the garden.

~Jason

***

Tribe Theory 101: Flourishing and Languishing

For the last thirteen years, I've been working on a comprehensive, universal method of helping people live better lives. This has been a long, arduous process that involved a lot of deep dives into social dynamics. The project had gotten incredibly complex and expansive, then involved a whole lotta refinement. What resulted? This idea I'm presenting through a series of ten infographics.

It starts with this one, which is an explanation of the concepts of Flourishing and Languishing. At the most basic level, "Flourishing" explains the state when life is good. Everything is clicking, we feel a deep sense of meaning, purpose, and belonging at three levels: Within ourselves, within our close personal relationships, and within the groups to which we belong.

In essence, I haven't just been working on trying to invent another path to human Flourishing. I've been trying to understand what makes different paths work, identify the conditions that allow them to succeed, and develop a practical method for cultivating those Flourishing conditions across the three levels of human life. 

What, Exactly, is Flourishing?

Flourishing begins with the individual. In positive psychology, flourishing describes a state of well-being that goes beyond simply feeling happy or being free from problems. It means living a life characterized by meaning, purpose, connection, engagement, personal growth, and a sense of agency over one's circumstances. A flourishing person develops their capabilities, pursues worthwhile goals, experiences satisfying relationships, and feels that their life matters. 

Importantly, flourishing does not mean perpetual happiness, extraordinary achievement, or the absence of suffering. People can experience grief, setbacks, uncertainty, and hardship while still living deeply fulfilling lives. Nor does flourishing require everyone to pursue the same ideals. What constitutes a good life depends partly on an individual's values, circumstances, needs, and aspirations. At its heart, individual flourishing means having both the opportunity and the capability to live a life we genuinely value.

Flourishing also occurs within our relationships. Human beings do not develop, struggle, or succeed in isolation. Our friendships, families, romantic partnerships, and other meaningful relationships profoundly influence the quality of our lives. A flourishing relationship is one in which people experience genuine care, trust, respect, connection, and mutual benefit. They can communicate honestly, maintain healthy boundaries, navigate disagreements, and support one another's growth without sacrificing their individuality. 

These relationships provide more than companionship: they create opportunities to feel understood, valued, supported, and meaningfully connected to others. Relational flourishing is not determined by the type of relationship, its longevity, or the intensity of its emotional bonds, but by how the people involved actually treat one another and whether the connection enriches their lives. Just as importantly, healthy relationships are reciprocal without being transactional; people contribute according to their abilities and circumstances, knowing that care and support need not always be exchanged in equal measure.

Finally, flourishing occurs at the level of our tribes, which are the communities and groups in which we live, work, learn, and belong. A flourishing tribe is more than a collection of happy individuals or friendly relationships. It is a functioning social community whose members have developed the trust, shared expectations, cooperative capabilities, and reciprocal responsibilities necessary to accomplish meaningful things together. Members experience genuine belonging while retaining their autonomy. They communicate honestly, resolve conflicts constructively, protect one another from harm, recognize individual contributions, and create opportunities for everyone to grow. 

A flourishing tribe becomes a dependable source of connection, capability, purpose, and mutual support, which acts as a safe harbor cultivated before life's inevitable storms arrive. 

Crucially, flourishing at these three levels is interconnected: capable individuals can strengthen relationships, healthy relationships can strengthen communities, and healthy communities can create conditions in which individuals and relationships flourish. This is the central insight of Tribe Theory: we can deliberately cultivate the social conditions that help human beings flourish, not merely as individuals, but together, and carry those capabilities into every community we touch.

If we graph out our goal in The Tribe, it's to foster Flourishing in our group members over time across these three domains:

What, Exactly, is Languishing?

Languishing begins when life slowly loses its vitality, often so gradually that we hardly notice what we've lost. We wake up, go to work, fulfill our obligations, pay our bills, and repeat the process, sometimes wondering when living became little more than maintaining the machinery of our existence. We may have careers, homes, possessions, entertainment, and all the outward evidence of a successful life, yet feel strangely empty inside. Our days become exercises in distraction: scrolling through social media, consuming endless entertainment, chasing small pleasures, and purchasing things that briefly interrupt an underlying sense of dissatisfaction. 

Modern life offers extraordinary convenience, but convenience cannot substitute for meaning, purpose, connection, or the exhilarating experience of becoming more fully alive. We become spectators of our own existence, watching the years pass while quietly wondering whether this is all there is. Sometimes nothing is obviously wrong, which makes the feeling even harder to explain. We're not necessarily depressed, desperate, or falling apart. We're simply no longer excited about being alive. The dreams that once animated us have faded into distant memories, replaced by routines that keep us functioning without giving us much reason to look forward to tomorrow.

Languishing within our relationships is perhaps even more painful, because it means experiencing loneliness in the presence of people who are supposed to matter to us. We can share a home, a bed, a workplace, or a lifetime of memories with someone and still feel profoundly alone. Conversations become logistical exchanges about schedules, responsibilities, and obligations. Familiarity replaces curiosity, affection becomes habitual, and meaningful communication gradually gives way to comfortable silence... or the exhausting effort of avoiding difficult truths. Friendships survive as occasional text messages, social media reactions, and vague promises that we should get together sometime. 

Modern life makes maintaining superficial contact remarkably easy while leaving little time or energy for the sustained attention that deeper relationships require. We learn to present polished versions of ourselves, carefully concealing the uncertainties, disappointments, and vulnerabilities we fear others might reject. Eventually, we may stop expecting to be genuinely understood. Relationships that once made us feel seen, desired, appreciated, or supported become arrangements we simply maintain. The tragedy is not necessarily that anyone has betrayed us or stopped caring. Sometimes two people who genuinely love one another gradually become strangers, separated by years of neglected conversations, unrealized possibilities, and the quiet resignation that this is simply what relationships become.

At the level of our tribes, languishing emerges when the communities that should give us belonging, shared purpose, and mutual support become little more than collections of people occupying the same space. We work alongside colleagues whose personal lives we barely know, attend organizations where nobody notices our absence, and inhabit neighborhoods where we recognize cars more readily than the people driving them. Workplaces may celebrate teamwork while rewarding individual competition, reducing human contribution to productivity metrics and performance evaluations. Institutions become preoccupied with protecting their procedures, reputations, and hierarchies rather than serving the people who sustain them. Communities lose their shared rituals, reciprocal responsibilities, and meaningful opportunities to accomplish things together. 

Nobody necessarily intends for this to happen; the erosion often results from accumulated neglect, competing demands, and social arrangements that reward efficiency over connection. We become interchangeable employees, anonymous customers, passive audiences, and isolated households surrounded by thousands of other people living similarly disconnected lives. 

The cruelest consequence is that we begin to accept this condition as normal. We stop expecting genuine trust, shared courage, collective purpose, or people who will stand beside us when life becomes difficult. We lower our expectations of one another until belonging means little more than being included on a roster. And when individuals, relationships, and entire communities learn to accept mere survival as an adequate substitute for flourishing, the Darkness doesn't arrive as some dramatic catastrophe. It settles over our lives so quietly that eventually we forget what it felt like to stand in the Fire.

If we graph out Languishing, this is what it looks like:

So, Where Are You Right Now?

Before you move on, I want you to do something most of us probably don't do nearly often enough: take an honest inventory of your life. 

Think back to the times when you felt truly alive. When you woke up excited about the day ahead, when you were learning and growing, when you felt capable of taking on whatever life threw at you. Remember the relationships that made you feel genuinely loved, understood, appreciated, and supported. Remember being part of a group of people who shared something meaningful, who trusted one another, who had your back, and who made you feel like you belonged somewhere. 

Now think about the other times. The periods when you were just going through the motions. The relationships where you felt lonely despite having someone beside you. The workplaces, organizations, or communities where you felt invisible, unappreciated, or utterly disconnected. We've probably all experienced some combination of these things. And if we're paying attention, those experiences can teach us an awful lot about what makes life worth living.

Now comes the uncomfortable part: Where are you right now? 

Are you flourishing as an individual, or have your ambitions, curiosity, and enthusiasm gradually given way to exhaustion and routine? Are your closest relationships sources of joy, connection, and mutual growth, or have they become arrangements you maintain because that's what you've always done? What about your tribes? Do you belong to communities where people genuinely know, trust, value, and protect one another? Or are you surrounded by people every day without ever feeling like you're truly part of something? 

And here's something especially important: you can be flourishing in one area of your life while languishing in another. You might have an extraordinary marriage and a soul-crushing job. A fulfilling career and almost no meaningful friendships. A supportive community and a private life that feels completely adrift. 

These aren't contradictions. They're reminders that the quality of our lives depends on more than any single accomplishment, relationship, or circumstance.

None of this is meant to convince you that something is wrong with your life. If you're flourishing, recognize it, appreciate it, and protect the conditions that make it possible. But if you're not, I want you to ask yourself a harder question: 

How long have you been accepting less from life than you actually want? 

Not because you lack discipline, ambition, or character, but perhaps because you've become accustomed to circumstances that no longer serve you. Maybe you've stopped expecting more from yourself. Maybe you've stopped expecting genuine intimacy from your relationships. Maybe you've stopped expecting honesty, courage, and reciprocal trust from the groups to which you belong. 

The danger isn't that we occasionally languish. That's part of being human. The danger is that we can spend years gradually lowering our expectations until a diminished life starts to feel perfectly normal. 

And because that decline rarely happens overnight, we may not recognize just how far we've drifted from the lives we once imagined living.

But sometimes, even when we can't identify exactly what's missing, we can feel it. There's a peculiar kind of dissatisfaction that creeps into an otherwise functional life. It's the nagging sense that something isn't quite right, that there should be more to our existence than the routines, distractions, obligations, and superficial connections we've accumulated. It might appear as restlessness, loneliness, frustration, or a quiet longing for something we can't quite name. It doesn't necessarily mean we're depressed, broken, or even languishing. But it might be worth listening to. 

In The Tribe of the Fire, we have a name for that feeling: The Ache. And in the next installment, we're going to explore what The Ache might be telling us, why so many aspects of modern life seem to amplify it, and how it can become an invitation to examine the conditions in which we're living.

Because sometimes the first step toward a better life isn't figuring out what we need to change. It's having the courage to ask whether the life we're living is really the life we want.

~Jason

***

Cops and Trauma: The Time Warp that Prevents Operationalizing Resiliency and Post-Traumatic Growth

Last week, I participated in an active shooter conference covering topics related to mass casualty events like school or church shootings. The audience was filled with administrators of police departments and Sheriff's Offices around the Mountain West. The last presenter, somewhat off-handedly, mentioned post-traumatic growth as a way of dealing with tragedy. He asked who in the room had heard of the concept, and to my shock, only about six or seven people raised their hands. The leaders of law enforcement agencies across an entire region had never heard of a concept that's been studied and publicized for three decades. 

Once the shock wore off, I was reminded of an observation I made pretty early in my second career: There's a lot of weird things about being a cop. One of the weirdest, though, is the mystery of the ideological time-warp. In the law enforcement industry, there seem to be some topics, concepts, or ideas that appear frozen in time. Specifically, most seem to come from 1990.

There's a lot more to this time-warp idea, but two examples are obvious. The first is teaching methodology. Based on almost every training or academy experience I've encountered around the US, cops use teaching methods that were popularized around the late '80s, so much so that my academy instructors didn't wear socks. Take this analysis with a grain of salt, though, because teaching was my first profession. I was expected to extremely well-versed in how to teach. In law enforcement, "how to teach" isn't a concern on the operational side, so there's no reason it would be emphasized. Officers have too much to learn already.

And if you got the socks reference, I love you.

Anyway, a lot has happened in our understanding of how humans learn, especially under the kind of conditions inherent to law enforcement. If the industry radically updated its teaching methods, we'd be able to develop more effective officers more efficiently. It would radically change the field by giving every cop on the street the knowledge and ability to adapt to whatever conditions they're facing in any given moment, and to make split-second decisions under incredible physiological stress. But it's a huge lift. Most departments don't want to take such a radical risk when failure means putting people's safety, and lives, in jeopardy. So we stick to the status quo, and officers are still taught the same way the officers who beat Rodney King were taught. I'll probably write more about this teaching methodology problem in the future, because I think it's the foundation of the first real evolution of law enforcement since the profession adopted its assembly-line, paramilitary structure in the 1930s.

The second example hits a lot closer to home. Law enforcement really struggles with officer wellness, and the consequences are catastrophic. The modern behavioral sciences, the same ones that figured out better ways to train and educate, have made remarkable strides in two areas that should be of direct interest to law enforcement: developing emotional and psychological resiliency, and post-traumatic growth. 

Both concepts didn't arrive on the scene until the '90s. Based on my time-warp hypothesis, that tracks. It's not a surprise these concepts are largely unknown. Which is tragic, because we could probably be saving a lot more lives if they were.

Resiliency

Let's start with resiliency. Resiliency is our ability to take a punch from life, shake it off, and keep moving forward. As such, it's a preventative measure. Resiliency is relatively easy to develop, but it requires deliberate effort. Interestingly, pretty much everyone in law enforcement already uses two of the core tactics: stress inoculation and controlled breathing.

Stress inoculation, as a preventative resiliency skill, is simply a matter of intentionally exposing yourself to stressful situations. I accidentally stumbled onto two great methods, ultramarathons and Brazilian jiu-jitsu (MMA works too). Both require dealing with extreme discomfort, intrusive negative thoughts and emotions, and moments where you have an overwhelming desire to quit. But since these are voluntary, recreational forms of adult "play," our framing of the events prevents negative psychological consequences. There are lots of ways to inoculate for stress, but the "play" angle is remarkably effective.

Controlled breathing, which most cops know as "box breathing", is just one tool from an extensive toolkit that sport psychologists have identified for managing our parasympathetic nervous system (the "fight or flight" response). In law enforcement, we almost always teach this as a means of calming down in high-stress situations. It's incredibly effective in those chaoetic situations. But it's also incredibly effective during quiet moments.

There's a weird "barefoot running effect" at play here. Barefoot running is an effective way to learn proper running form because it provides immediate biofeedback, you suddenly pay close attention to how everything feels. Awareness.

With controlled breathing, slowing your breath does two things simultaneously: it activates your parasympathetic nervous system and shuts down the adrenaline response, and it forces you to pay attention to your own arousal state. You start to develop a real sense of how ramped up you actually are. Once you're aware of that, you'll start noticing when anxiety creeps in throughout a normal day, and through conditioning, you'll automatically start breathing in response to that awareness. It's a genuinely cool effect.

This can be made even more effective by adding a secondary reinforcer, which is a classically conditioned association that triggers the calming response on its own. To do this, I chewed spearmint gum. Preferably Mentos brand.

When running and rolling in jiu-jitsu, I'd chew this particular flavor of gum. In both sports, a major goal is efficiency, competition in both is essentially a war of attrition, and calm is efficient. And thanks to evolution, the act of chewing itself has a calming effect. Our ancestors only ate when they were safe from predators. This is also probably why campfires make us feel safe and help us form closer social bonds. Probably also why we all have a "fireplace and bearskin rug" fantasy. Anyway...

The Other Tools

Smart people who like to tinker with human behavior have developed some other powerful tools for improving officer wellness. A major one is learning to reframe narratives.

We see seriously horrific, tragic things on a regular basis. We see people in what they will later describe as the worst moment of their lives. And we see the people who victimize others, individuals whose capacity to cause harm is limited only by how aggressively the justice system pursues them. In short, we see a lot of shit.

What isn't widely understood is that we can edit the story our brain constructs from these events. When something unfolds in front of us, our brain attempts to make sense of it by building a narrative. Our personalities and life experiences shape how that story gets told. But human memory being what it is, we're capable of changing the story when we replay it. All we have to do is deliberately shift what we focus on when we recall the memory.

Embarrassingly, I use Mr. Rogers' "look for the helpers" idea. It actually works remarkably well. When I recall a difficult event, I picture the citizens and colleagues who, in the face of something terrible, instantly snapped into the mode of helping the victims. It's a primal response I've seen universally... it doesn't matter if you're young or old, male or female, liberal or conservative. People help people.

When I focus on that, it gives me tremendous optimism about the future, for my kids, my grandkids, all of us. And it effectively neutralizes the weight of the bad stuff I witnessed. It's a shockingly effective way to prevent PTSD from taking root.

Another well-established technique is having an authentic "tribe", a small group where trust and communication are strong enough that members can speak openly and honestly, and where a shared culture of honor and accountability ensures confidentiality. This small group, usually no more than a handful of people, allows the person who experienced the trauma to talk through every aspect of what happened. That act of retelling does something we still don't fully understand, the other members seem to "absorb" some of the negative emotional weight. Done a few times, this process significantly diminishes the lasting harm of the event.

I study and write about tribes a lot, and can unequivocally say having a group who you can trust and can effectively communicate with will solve most of the problems we face today. That extends to dealing with trauma. 

Some of My Tools

I have a few tools I've developed over the years, and I'm sharing them in case other people find them useful.

The first is curiosity. Whenever I'm on a scene, talking to people, or working through evidence, I'm deeply curious about everything around me. A big part of police work is figuring out what happened from as objective a perspective as possible. To do that well, we need to shift our attention away from the central, obvious thing and notice everything else.

Understanding why that works requires a quick look at how attention functions. We focus on what we're focused on. Our attentional capacity is limited, but what it does focus on gets very high bandwidth. Think of attention as a laser pointer. Most people enter a room and lock that laser onto the most attention-grabbing thing present. Most cops don't work that way. Their laser darts around the room taking inventory before settling on whatever brought them there. This becomes automatic, and it's part of what drives the hypervigilance that plagues the profession.

My strategy involves leaning into what the unconscious brain is already doing. We know a lot about whatever the laser is pointing at. But our unconscious is simultaneously collecting, analyzing, and interpreting everything the laser isn't pointing at, and that's a vastly larger stream of information. The catch is that we can't access it directly; trying to examine it just moves the laser.

What our unconscious does with all that information is genuinely remarkable. It collects, analyzes, interprets, develops a response, and then packages everything into a compact signal we experience as emotion. At any given moment, our brain is sending us these emotional packages. If we learn to pay attention to them and understand what they represent, we can infer what our unconscious is telling us about our immediate situation.

The cool thing is that your unconscious never lies. It's the most honest signal available to us. It can occasionally be wrong, but that's rare. Far more often, we dismiss those signals and end up getting hurt. If you want to go deeper on this, Gavin de Becker's work is excellent.

So... curiosity. Whenever I enter a new environment or arrive on a scene, I shift my attention for just a fraction of a second to that emotional package. What is my unconscious telling me about this situation? First, I'm checking for any danger signal, like fear, or a sense that something is incongruent, that something's out of place or someone's behaving in a way that doesn't fit the circumstances. If the package contains even a hint of that, I go straight into tactical mode. This doesn't happen often, but when it does, the package is almost always right.

If the package signals anything else, I go into "what's going on here" mode and get genuinely curious about everything in front of me.

This curiosity is also a particular form of healthy compartmentalization. It allows me to dissociate from the emotionally-charged empathic, compassionate human reaction to genuinely tragic events, to set that aside and engage with the scene analytically. Of course, we also need the ability to snap out of that when the situation calls for comforting or calming people, but that's a learnable skill too. The compartmentalization is what makes all of it possible. It lets me defer the actual emotional processing until later, almost always by talking to my tribe, and focusing on the helpers when I retell the story.

The other major tactic is what I'd call calibrated expectations about human behavior.

In college, I studied history and psychology, and a significant part of that was the intersection of the two. Specifically, the psychology behind the darkest chapters in human history. We have a long, well-documented record of doing absolutely terrible, cruel things to each other, sometimes purely for the sake of watching others suffer. And we get creative about it. Social psychologists like Stanley Milgram have effectively demonstrated that this capacity for "evil" isn't an aberration confined to monsters; the latent potential exists in all of us. Tweak the conditions just right, and ordinary people become the guards at Auschwitz. The flip side is equally true: humans are also capable of infinite selflessness, heroism, and moral courage. After learning all of this, I've spent two decades teaching it.

In short, I've spent my adult life studying and teaching the full spectrum of human behavior. Nothing I encounter as a cop surprises me, because I genuinely understand what we're all capable of, in both directions. It's what Jung meant when he talked about integrating your shadow. And bad things don't follow some cosmic script that rewards goodness and punishes evil, at least not one I can see. Tragedy is largely random and indifferent.

Accepting those two realities, the full range of human capacity and the randomness of bad outcomes, means that what I witness, no matter how severe, doesn't violate my worldview. It doesn't make me feel less safe or trigger existential dread. That acceptance frees me to do my job: keep people safe, investigate objectively, help victims and witnesses however I can, and make sure suspects' rights are protected. And it makes it a lot easier to stay curious.

Conclusion

In law enforcement, we don't have to stay trapped in 1990. The same blind spots that keep us training like we're preparing for the Cold War keep us from implementing real, effective officer wellness strategies.

Building a toolbox for resiliency, and for processing what outpaces that resiliency, is absolutely within our reach. Hell, we could probably solve most of our problems by reading Ordinary Men and then Man's Search for Meaning, training a little jiu-jitsu, chewing gum, and paying attention to what our feelings are trying to tell us..

We don't have to accept the status quo. We can grow. We need to grow. We owe it to our families, friends, and colleagues. We owe it to the people we serve.

~Jason

***

A Political Stance for Human Beings: Beyond Left and Right Toward Strength, Belonging, and Aliveness

Politicians hate to admit a very simple fact of the American political landscape: most of us don't actually fit the political box we've been handed.

You're not just some vague talking point uttered on some biased, partisan news network. You believe in personal responsibility and think the healthcare system is a disaster. You care about community, especially the most vulnerable members of our community, and you think bureaucratic overreach is real. You want strong families and you're not interested in silly culture war theater. You've watched both parties spend decades screaming past each other while your actual life, the relationships, the sense of purpose, the feeling that something real is happening, quietly vanishes.

We sometimes frame this as political apathy, or maybe political fatigue. But really, it's a rational response to a system that keeps attempting to solve the wrong problems, and does a poor job at that.

I want to offer you something different. It's not a new party, and it's not a new ideology with a fancier logo or a catchier tagline. It's a fundamental question... a question that should drive our personal political ideology. 

The Real Diagnosis

Most people think politics is about parties, personalities, and policy fights. Strip all that away, and I think it's actually about something much simpler: 

What kind of life are we building, and what kind of people are we becoming?

That question cuts a whole lot deeper than a simple "are you left or right?"

The reality is we've built a society that is genuinely excellent at survival and genuinely terrible at aliveness. Comfort? Check. Safety? Check. Convenience? We've optimized it to death. But somewhere in that optimization, we quietly dismantled the structures that made life feel vivid. Real relationships have been replaced by impersonal, uncaring networks. Shared struggle has been replaced by private, lonely optimization. Real challenge, the kind that actually develops people, has been removed in the name of safety and comfort.

The result of this shift isn't societal collapse. Instead, it's something quieter and way harder to identify. It's a low-grade hum, like that ever-present buzz of flourescent lights that you think you adapt to until it's gone. It's a life that works on paper but doesn't quite quench our thirst for really living. You can function. You can succeed by every external metric. But something feels off. Not broken so much as just... muted.

I call this the Ache.

The Ache isn't depression, though it can tip into it. It's not burnout, though it can look like it. It's what happens when a human being lives inside a system that keeps them alive but starves the conditions that make them feel alive. It's the byproduct of a society that has banished real belonging, visible contribution, honest feedback, and meaningful hardships and challenges.

"So what the Hell does this have to do with politics?!?"

That's the question I get a lot, especially when I challenge the actions of our President, Congress, State, or even Local officials. And it cuts to the reason The Ache exists.

The Ache, despite what society, your parents, your spouse, or your political leaders tell you, is not a personal failure. It's a failure in the very architecture of our modern society. Modernity, if you will.

How We're Actually Built

Human beings are not built for isolation. We're not lone wolves. The "rugged individual" is a compelling story, but it's a biological fiction.

We evolved in small, close-knit groups. Or were created for small, close-knit groups. Our particular favorite origin story doesn't matter, because the truth holds up regardless. We're made for groups where people were known, where your presence or absence changed things, where contribution was visible, and where reputation was real. That environment didn't just shape our culture. It shaped our nervous systems. We're wired for co-regulation, for trusted contact with people who can offer real feedback and share real weight.

Strip that away, and people don't immediately fall apart. They adapt. They become functional. They get productive. They build careers and accumulate stuff. But something in the system goes underused, like an engine that never gets pushed past idle. 

Modernity is really good at idling.

What modern culture celebrates as independence is often just deprivation with clever branding.

This is why both political parties keep missing the point. Hyper-individualism, the libertarian strain that treats every person as a fully self-contained unit, sounds great in theory. In practice, it produces environments where social bonds wear thin, responsibility becomes optional, and people are left to manufacture meaning entirely on their own. It's freedom in the abstract, but isolation in reality.

But the collectivist answer isn't better. Moving all solutions upward into larger, more distant systems, managed by technocrats who "know what's good for you," trades one problem for another. You get equity on paper but control over your destiny gets stripped away. People aren't shaped by real participation in community anymore. They're processed by systems. Replaceable cogs in a giant machine. Just another number. That doesn't produce aliveness; it produces compliance.

Both answers keep solving for the wrong variable.

The prject I've been developing, Applied Tribal Science, or "Tribe Theory", is my attempt to right the ship using a synthesis of modern behavioral and neurobiological science and old-timey religious and mythological wisdom, blended with the day-to-day realities of your life and mine. And that is what drives my political stance.

My Actual Stance on the Issues

This foundation, rooted in the free, honest expression of our authentic selves in service of a group of people who matter, results in some deeply-pragmatic stances on the issues that seem to hopelessly divide us. But that division is not inevitability. Read through this list; without even knowing you (well, most of you), I bet these resonate regardless of the bumper stickers you slap on your car or truck. 

I stand for strong people. Not people who need comfort, people who avoid struggle, or people who perpetually play the victim card. People who can survive struggle, face reality, and be counted on to take responsibility and contribute to the greater good.

I stand for real relationships. Not followers, audiences, customers, or loose digital affiliations, but genuine relationships where people are known, needed, and held to something.

I stand for communities with standards. Not cults of personality, brands posing as identities, or businesses posing as "families." Places where belonging means something, where contribution is visible, and where expectations exist because the people inside them decided they matter.

I stand for institutions that earn trust by actually doing what they exist to do in a way that is transparent and honorable, not by performing legitimacy while quietly managing the speed of their rot while they use their position to curry favors, foster nepotism, or maximize that end-of-the-year bonus by exploiting those they lead. 

I stand for truth, competence, and human-level scale. I stand for systems people can understand, influence, and actually hold accountable.

None of this maps cleanly onto the sociopolitical left or right. That's the point. And probably why you, despite jumping through all the hoops your party demands, still feel The Ache.

The Fire Triangle

Tribe Theory is a practical model. Fire makes a handy analogy for the art and science of living a life worth living. If you want a fire, you need three things: fuel, oxygen, and heat. Remove any one of them, the fire goes out. Human beings work the same way.

Fuel is capacity. It's physical health, baseline stability, and the ability to show up and engage. Without it, nothing else really works. You can't push someone toward growth when they're running on empty.

Oxygen is truth flow. It's the ability to say what's actually real , and be heard without immediately having to perform, defend, or filter. In most modern environments, Oxygen is severely restricted. People manage impressions. They soften edges. They avoid saying the thing that would actually move things forward. When Oxygen is low, life becomes performative. People are present but not real.

Heat is pressure. It's challenge, consequence, risk, responsibility. It's the element most modern systems work hardest to eliminate. But Heat is what forces growth. It sharpens attention, and reveals character, turns potential into something real. Without it, people don't break — they stagnate.

Aliveness happens when all three are present and balanced.

Look at American life through this lens and the problem becomes visible. Too much comfort, not enough challenge. Too much performance, not enough truth. Too much top-down management, not enough real belonging. The result is people who seem stable but drifting. Connected but not known. Active but not engaged.

This isn't the result of a policy failure, the tax structure, or some culture war that generates outrage-fueled headlines. It's the result of a structural failure. And policy won't fix it unless the structure changes.

What This Means In Practice

My politics start with a question most political frameworks never ask: Does this system produce stronger, more connected people, or does it create dependency on faraway people solving problems that don't really matter?

On the economy: I support markets when they reward contribution, skill, and competence. Those are the conditions that produce capable people. But markets aren't an ideology I'm loyal to. If an economic system makes people wealthier while uprooting them from the local ecosystem, weakening families, and dissolving local trust , it's solving one problem while creating three more. You end up with people who have more and feel less.

On welfare: There's a difference between a bridge and a holding pattern. I support systems that stabilize people in crisis and move them back into meaningful participation. That's what a functioning society does. But if a system removes urgency and responsibility without restoring the ability to solve your own problems, it doesn't solve the problem. It extends it. Help should put people back in the game, not quietly remove them from it.

On education: A healthy system produces disciplined, capable, socially functional adults. It builds judgment, attention, and the ability to engage with reality. What we have now sorts, signals, and shields. It produces credentials without competence and sensitivity without resilience. Education should form people, not process them so they become marginally better cogs.

On institutions: I support strong institutions, but only when they're both effective and worthy of trust. Competence without legitimacy breeds resentment. Legitimacy without competence breeds chaos. You need both. When institutions fail at that, they don't just break functionally. They deepen the Ache.

On family: Families are a core infrastructure, not a lifestyle preference. Families are where identity is formed, where emotional regulation is learned, where people first experience real belonging and real responsibility. When families weaken, you lose one of the most reliable antidotes to the Ache. The downstream effects show up everywhere. Notably, "families" can take all kinds of forms and need to be measured by the strength of the love and support within the connections, not based on some predetermined acceptable format. 

On free speech: We need open honesty. A system without truth flow can't function. If people can't say what's real, the entire structure becomes performative. But freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequence. Culture still judges. The point isn't to eliminate conflict; it's to let reality boil to the surface so the system can adjust.

On government size: I'm not committed to "small government" as a slogan. I'm interested in systems that are as local as possible and as large as necessary. The problem with scale isn't ideological; it's human. As systems get larger, they become more abstract, more anonymous, less responsive. That erodes trust and communication. And without trust and communication, you can't build anything durable.

Across all of it, the question is the same: does this move people toward Aliveness, or further into the Ache?

What I'm Rejecting

Any effective ideology draws a sharp line between what is accepted and what is rejected. To accept (or reject) everything is to believe nothing. And believing nothing is the worst Ache of them all. 

I reject pseudo-tribes, and American politics is full of them. Partisan identity, online communities, ideological camps, outrage theatrics, activist circles... they give people a sense of alignment, a shared language, and a set of enemies. But they rarely provide what real belonging requires. There's no real accountability. There's no visible contribution. There's no shared stakes. You can enter and exit at will, signal your position, feel the dopamine hit of being "connected," and never actually be known.

Pseudo-tribes give people the theater of belonging while deepening the loneliness underneath it.

I reject therapeutic politics. Discomfort is not the enemy of growth. Policies and cultural norms increasingly built around minimizing offense and protecting people from difficult experiences are not compassionate in practice; they produce environments where truth is filtered, challenge is softened, and people are shielded from the exact pressures that would develop them into resilient, funcational human beings. You don't get stronger individuals. You get people who are less able to engage with reality when it stops accommodating them. Life is hard. We struggle, suffer, and experience tragedy and loss. Coddling people to protect their delicate sensibilities does nothing but create a society that will crumble at the first sign of real adversity.

I reject resentment-as-substitute-for-structure. There are legitimate frustrations driving populist movements. But channeling those frustrations into anger without building anything is not a political vision. It's just the Ache monetized for votes. And it makes us believe our neighbors are somehow our enemies. The Ache loves that isolation. 

And underneath all of it, I reject a society that keeps people comfortable enough to comply and empty enough not to resist.

That pattern shows up across the spectrum, overprotection on one side, distraction and consumption on the other. Both lead to the same place: people who are stable, manageable, and quietly disconnected from anything that would demand something real from them.

The Tradeoff

None of this is easy. I'm not selling a comfortable version of politics.

What I'm describing asks more of people, not less. I'm asking for standards, not just acceptance. I'm asking for friction and productive conflict, not just comfort. I'm asking for truth and honesty, even when it's inconvenient. I'm asking for responsibnility and accountability, not just protection.

We have spent decades chasing comfort and safety as if they were the highest goods. In doing so, we've produced a different kind of suffering... not sharp and acute, but slow and pervasive. A thinning of experience. A loss of edge. The quiet sense that life is being managed rather than lived.

Comfort isn't neutral. It has a cost. And that cost is way steeper than we imagine.

When you remove too much pressure, you remove the conditions that force people to develop. When you remove too much risk, you remove the conditions that make things matter. You end up with people who are protected from hardship and cut off from the experiences that would make them feel real.

The alternative makes different tradeoffs. We have less comfort. We have less universal accommodation. We have more friction. We have more responsibility. In exchange, though, we get stronger people, deeper relationships, higher trust, a life that actually matters.

I'll take that trade every time, because we only have one life to live. We're all going to die. And I would rather spend this life feeling alive instead of feeling comfortable.

The Bottom Line

If you've read this far, there's a good chance you already felt the Ache, even if you've never called it that. The low hum underneath a life that looks fine. The sense that something's missing even when nothing is obviously wrong.

A wise man once told me most of us shoot for a "nice" life, where "nice" means "not inclined to critically-examine." 

After many years of trying to figure out what makes us feel alive, trying to figure our how to live a life worth living, I think that man was right. Because once we really start examining our lives, we start to realize we've been pissing away the limited time we have collecting things and experiences we don't care about to impress people we don't even really like. And our political system just makes us feel better about that sacrifice.

There's probably a good chance that neither party has ever quite named what you're actually after.

What you want isn't a better political argument. It's a life that feels more real and more connected. You want a life that demands more in all the right ways. You want a life that feels like it's YOUR life, not someone else's.

That's what I'm building. It's not a perfect system, and it's not a frictionless utopia. It's something far messier and far more honest: a society that expects something from you, shapes you through that expectation, and gives you real belonging in return.

The alternative is a society full of stable, lonely, well-managed people... technically alive, functionally absent.

I'll take the messy version, thank you.

~Jason

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This essay is drawn from Tribe Theory, an ongoing framework for understanding why people feel the Ache, and how to build structures that actually address it.