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 Real relationships have been replaced by impersonal, uncaring networks. Shared struggle has been replaced by private, lonely optimization.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

***

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.

Forming Your Tribe 101

If we want to build a tribe, we start by unlearning what modern culture has taught us about groups.

A tribe is not a chat thread, a Facebook group, an audience, a brand, or a collection of people who are into the same weird things. A tribe is a small, closely-connected set of people who become accountable to one another through repeated, shared effort.

Tribes of this kind require a few key ingredients, which can be used as a rough guide to start our own tribes.

First, keep it small. Five to twelve people is the workable range. Fewer than that and the group falls apart under if someone stops showing up or, more commonly, conflict causes irreparable damage. More than that and people start hiding in the crowd. Tribes work because everyone is visible. Eventually, once established, a tribe can grow to about 100-150 people and still function as a tribe, but that's WAAAYYYY too big in the beginning. 

Second, the group must already be bonded in some way. You don't start with random strangers sitting in a circle in room and hope connection emerges. There has to be a seed, and that seed can be a shared activity, shared history, shared place, or shared challenge. The bond doesn’t need to be deep yet, but it has to be real. 

Third, boundaries matter. A tribe must know who is in and who is out. That doesn't mean exclusion for its own sake, but it means clarity. Without edges, people don’t invest. Open-ended groups drift into either performance or disengagement. Psychologically, the boundary has to invoke the in-group/ out-group bias. That's the measure we can use to decide if our boundaries are defined well enough.

Fourth, in-person contact must be repeated and embodied. This is non-negotiable, and probably the hardest part about forming a tribe in our modern social media-dominated world. Tribes have to be built through regular, in-person contact. And that contact has to involve effort. Working, training, building, cooking, struggling... even suffering... it has to be something that costs energy. Shared effort creates trust faster than conversation ever will.

Fifth, contribution must be visible. Everyone has to matter in a concrete way. Each member should know what they bring to the tribe, and each member should know what others bring to the tribe. When contribution is invisible, resentment grows and belonging becomes symbolic instead of earned.

Sixth, accountability must be relational. Rules alone do not create cohesion. Expectations do. Members need permission to call each other out when standards slip. This is uncomfortable, which is why most groups avoid it... which is also why most groups fail.

Finally, the tribe needs a story. Not a mission statement or some other feel-good bullshit. Your tribe needs an explanation of why this group exists and why showing up matters, based on the real, lived experiences of the tribe members. The story doesn’t need to be grand, but it does need to be true. If people can’t explain why the tribe exists in a sentence or two, the tribe doesn’t exist. Yet.

There's one more thing that's not quite an ingredient, but a consideration. It's the one place where almost all modern pseudo-tribes fail: 

A real tribe has to be demanding.

I'm not suggesting the tribe be abusive or rigid, but it does have to be demanding enough that participation costs something. That something could be time, effort, discomfort, responsibility... whatever. If the bar is low, people drift. If nothing is asked, nothing is earned. Tribes form around shared standards, not shared comfort. The friction is not a flaw; it is the mechanism that creates the real connections between the members of the tribe that matter. 

If you remove ANY one of these ingredients, you may still have a group, but it will devolve into a club, a support circle, a fandom, or a social outlet. Not a tribe. In that situation, the connections among members is too weak to get the real benefits of a tribe. They're not useless, but they're not the kinds of connections we need to solve the kinds of problems tribes solve.

A tribe is not something you declare. It is something that emerges when these conditions are held long enough for trust, identity, and accountability to form.

This is the starting point.

 Now go form your tribe.

 

~ Jason 

Tribe Theory II: The Architecture of Human Life

 

Most of us who have experienced The Ache (see the first essay) of modern life have tried to fix the problem. There's certainly no shortage of fixes. We might change relationships, seek promotions, try new productivity apps, schedule self-case "me time", seek out therapy, travel, get really fit, experiment with various life hacks, joining online communities, go on mindfullness retreats, or just choose to wait it out. Hell, I've dabbled in most of those myself. There's no shame in trying to make things better.

None of these really solve the problem, though. They might give us a temporary boost, a momentary high, or a passing relief from The Ache, but eventually, we return to the baseline. The problem is we treat The Ache like a personal deficit to be managed, soothed, or distracted away. But The Ache isn't a problem. The Ache is a signal. 

Specifically, it's a signal that the architecture of our life is not sufficient to give us what we need to experience sustained Aliveness. 

To understand the architecture we need, we first need to understand the architecture we have.

The Six Domains of Life

Human experience can be reduced to six separate but interconnected domains - physical, psychological, emotional, social, spiritual, and sexual. Each plays a critically-important role in a healthy, fulfilling, meaningful life. In each one, we fall somewhere in that spectrum between The Ache and Aliveness I discussed in the first post. 

Experiencing the flow of Aliveness in each domain, really, is the point of this project. That's my Utopia. The times I've experienced Aliveness across all six domains have been the points of my life that are so overwhelmingly great, I don't have words to articulate the experience. I want you to experience that, too. And this is my first serious attempt at a roadmap. 

Anyway, here's a rundown of each, and how The Ache and Aliveness manifest in each:

Physical: The condition and capacity of the body to generate energy, tolerate stress, recover, and move through the world without chronic pain or depletion. This includes sleep, nutrition, movement, health, and physical safety. Over seventy percent of all "make your life better" self-help materials sold in the US fit in this domain. If the body is compromised, everything else becomes theoretical.

• The Ache - The body feels like a liability you manage rather than a vehicle you inhabit. Energy is inconsistent and fragile. You’re tired even after rest, wired but exhausted, prone to small aches that linger. Movement feels optional or annoying. You rely on stimulants, screens, or sugar to prop yourself up. Your body is something you drag through the day.
• Aliveness - The body feels inhabited. Energy is not constant, but it’s reliable. You recover faster. Sleep actually restores. Movement feels grounding instead of burdensome. Physical effort clears your head instead of draining it. You feel present in your muscles, breath, and posture. The body becomes an ally rather than a constraint.

Psychological: The ability to think clearly, learn, focus, make sense of reality, and update beliefs in response to evidence. This includes attention, cognition, curiosity, pattern recognition, and meaning-making. A healthy mental domain allows you to orient, decide, and adapt rather than ruminate or rigidly loop.

• The Ache - Your mind loops. You overthink, second-guess, and rehearse conversations that already happened or may never occur. Focus is shallow and fragmented. You consume information compulsively but integrate very little. Decisions feel heavier than they should. Clarity comes in flashes and then evaporates.
• Aliveness - Your mind feels oriented. You can focus deeply and let go cleanly. Curiosity replaces rumination. You think forward instead of sideways. Problems feel solvable, even when they’re hard. Learning excites you instead of overwhelming you. Thought becomes a tool, not a trap.

Emotional: The capacity to feel, regulate, express, and metabolize emotions without suppression, flooding, or dissociation. This includes access to anger, grief, joy, fear, and desire, as well as the ability to stay present with emotional intensity. Emotional health is not calmness; it is range and resilience.

• The Ache - Emotions are either muted or overwhelming. You stay “fine” most of the time, but underneath is irritation, sadness, or numbness you can’t quite identify. Strong feelings feel dangerous or inconvenient. You manage emotions rather than metabolize them. Joy is rare. Anger leaks out in places it doesn't belong.
• Aliveness - You can feel without being hijacked. Sadness moves through instead of settling in. Anger is clean and directional. Joy appears without apology. You don’t need to justify your feelings or suppress them to stay functional. Emotional intensity feels like information, not a threat.

Social: The quality, depth, and reliability of your real relationships over time. This includes trust, honesty, conflict tolerance, accountability, and mutual responsibility. A functioning social domain means you are known, needed, and able to influence and be influenced by others.

• The Ache - You’re surrounded by people but not deeply known by anyone. Conversations stay polite, efficient, or performative. You filter constantly. Conflict is avoided or explosive. You don’t feel truly seen, especially your true, authentic self, and you’re not sure who would notice if you pulled back. Relationships cost energy but don’t return it.
• Aliveness - You are embedded. There are people who can tell when you’re off and say so. You can speak plainly without rehearsing. Conflict sharpens rather than erodes connection. Your presence matters. Your absence is felt. Relationships generate energy instead of draining it, even for introverts.

Spiritual: Your relationship to meaning beyond the self. This includes values, purpose, transcendence, morality, awe, and orientation toward something larger than personal comfort or survival. A healthy spiritual domain answers the question, “Why does this matter?” without drifting into dogma or nihilism.

• The Ache - Life feels flat and transactional. You stay busy but uninspired. You question whether what you’re doing actually matters, then distract yourself from the question. Meaning is outsourced to roles, achievements, or consumption. You suspect there’s something more, but it feels inaccessible or embarrassing to pursue.
• Aliveness - Your life feels oriented. Effort connects to purpose. You experience moments of awe, reverence, or humility that recalibrate you. You know why you’re doing what you’re doing, even when it’s hard. Meaning isn’t abstract; it’s embodied in your choices and commitments.

Sexual: The capacity for desire, attraction, polarity, intimacy, and embodied pleasure that is alive rather than performative or compulsive. This includes libido, erotic energy, vulnerability, and honest expression of want and desire. Sexual health is not frequency; it is vitality, presence, and truth in connection.

• The Ache - Desire is muted, mechanical, or compartmentalized. Sex becomes routine, performative, or avoidant. Attraction feels risky. Vulnerability feels unsafe. You may crave novelty without intimacy or intimacy without passion. Sexual energy exists, but it’s disconnected from truth and presence.
• Aliveness - Desire is alive and honest. Attraction carries charge and meaning. Sexuality feels embodied, flirty, playful, and real rather than scripted or compulsive. Vulnerability deepens heat instead of killing it. Sexual energy becomes a source of vitality, bonding, and self-knowledge, not something you manage or suppress.

These domains are interdependent, not modular. Damage, neglect, or falseness in one domain eventually degrades the others. Aliveness emerges when energy, truth, and pressure can move freely across all six, not when one is perfected in isolation. This is why individuals who immerse themselves in one or a few domains still feel The Ache.

The domains themselves are interdependent and require co-regulation (other people's interactions) to operate in synchronization. This means they're less of improvement categories and more like windows that reveal the areas where co-regulation is blocked. 

The Myth of the Solo Hero

Modern life is built on the myth of the Solo Hero: the idea that a capable individual should be able to regulate their own energy, emotions, meaning, motivation, and direction through insight, discipline, and personal effort. This myth came about because, once we reach adulthood, we live in a world where we don't need anyone to find shelter, collect food, and maintain a relative degree of personal safety.

This Solo Hero model didn’t arise because it works so much as it arose because it scaled to sizes larger than tribes. Since the agricultural revolution, and especially since industrialization and digitization, survival has become increasingly individual and abstracted. As mentioned, food, safety, income, and status no longer depend on a small group of known people but on systems, institutions, and interfaces. As a result, responsibility shifted focus inward. We learned to treat the self as a closed system. This system, we believe, should think its way out of problems, manage its emotions privately, optimize its habits, and fix itself in isolation. The Solo Operator became the default because it’s administratively convenient.

This is why modern “fixes” fail in such a predictable way. They aren't wrong, but they're domain-local solutions applied to a system-level problem. Therapy can improve emotional insight but often leaves social accountability untouched. Fitness boosts physical energy but doesn’t create meaning or relational stakes. Career advancement increases pressure without Oxygen. Productivity systems improve output while quietly stripping life of texture. Meditation apps soothe the nervous system without asking anything of the self. Spiritual retreats offer meaning without consequence. Dating apps stimulate novelty without safety or truth. Travel provides temporary perspective without continuity. Self-help frameworks generate insight without feedback. Biohacking, journaling, breathwork, cold plunges, mindfulness streaks, coaching programs, online communities, personality systems, even psychedelics... all of these can produce short-term spikes in one domain. But because the other domains remain unchanged, or compensate in the background, the system always returns to baseline of The Ache. This is why people feel brief relief followed by the same quiet emptiness. The problem was never effort or intelligence. It was architecture.

No individual can keep all six domains alive alone, and the attempt to do so inevitably fails. The physical domain requires shared cycles and recovery; left alone, it turns into exhaustion or obsession. The psychological domain needs challenge and correction; alone, it loops and rationalizes. The emotional domain needs witnessing; alone, feelings are either suppressed or flood the system. The social domain requires continuity and consequence; alone, connection becomes performative or avoidant. The spiritual domain needs shared meaning and lived commitment; alone, it drifts into dogma or nihilism. The sexual domain requires polarity, safety, and truth; alone, desire becomes either compulsive or numb. 

This is why insight dies, discipline plateaus, therapy hits a ceiling, and optimization stops working. Self-regulation cannot sustain itself across domains without relational feedback. What people call burnout, midlife crisis, loss of passion, chronic anxiety, or quiet depression is often something simpler: a human nervous system trying to run a six-domain life as a solo operator.

This is how people become functional but empty inside. They are productive, informed, and self-aware, yet internally fragmented. They can explain themselves but not feel alive. They manage symptoms instead of restoring their authentic self. The Ache persists not because they haven’t tried hard enough, but because the Solo Hero model asks a single person to do what humans were never designed to do alone. Understanding this doesn’t fix the problem, but it makes it impossible to keep mistaking the problem for a personal failure.

Because that's the real tragedy. When we feel the Ache, especially relative to the apparent success we see from other people splashed across social media, we don't blame the architecture of modern life. We blame ourselves. The result is predictable: either quiet resignation, or a deeper commitment to the same solo-hero fixes that have been failing us since the Ache first appeared.

When a system fails repeatedly, people adapt to survive inside it. That adaptation tends to follow a specific pattern. The Solo Hero model subtly trains us to become a particular version of ourselves that can function inside that demand. Over time, most people do succeed, but not by becoming more alive. They succeed by becoming more manageable. Starting in childhood, they learn which parts of themselves produce results, approval, and stability, and which parts introduce risk, friction, or cost. The former are strengthened. The latter are muted, postponed, or buried.

This is where we see The Ache for what it is - grief for something unnamed we're missing. 

The Mask and The Ember 

To survive modern life as a Solo Operator, we develop what I call The Mask, an adaptive social identity optimized for performance, approval, and safety. The Mask is competent. It gets things done. It learns the rules, reads the room, manages impressions, and avoids unnecessary exposure. Modern systems reward this relentlessly. Careers advance it. Platforms amplify it. Institutions depend on it. From the outside, the Mask often looks like success.

But beneath the Mask is something else entirely.

I call it the Ember; it's the irreducible, living self that wants truth, risk, contact, and meaningful consequence. The Ember is not optimized. It is curious, volatile, desirous, principled, and relational. It wants to be seen without rehearsal and challenged without being managed. It doesn’t care about appearing functional; it cares about being real. The Ember is where Aliveness originates.

Modern life does not attack the Ember directly. It simply makes it inconvenient.

The Mask becomes dominant because it works. From an early age, we learn which parts of ourselves are rewarded and which create problems for those around us. Curiosity that slows things down, emotions that complicate outcomes, desire that disrupts plans, and questions that threaten stability are quietly discouraged. What is rewarded is reliability, competence, emotional containment, and performance. We learn to be "good" boys and girls. 

Over time, we assemble an adaptive identity optimized for approval and survival. This identity, the Mask, learns how to manage impressions, meet expectations, and avoid unnecessary risk. In modern life, the Mask isn’t a lie; it’s a tool. It helps us earn money, maintain relationships, and function inside institutions. The problem isn’t that the Mask exists. It’s that, in a world that rewards performance more than presence, the Mask slowly becomes the whole self. It acts as an armor that keeps people out. And it keeps our Ember in. 

As the Mask expands, the Ember starves. The Ember is the part of us that wants truth over comfort, connection over control, risk over safety, and aliveness over optimization. Modern life offers almost no protected space for this part to breathe. There is nowhere to speak plainly without consequences rippling through reputation, income, or stability. Wanting too much is labeled immature. Anger is inconvenient. Longing is embarrassing. So the Ember goes quiet, not because it disappears, but because expression is costly. Desire dulls and vitality flattens. Life becomes managed rather than inhabited. Aliveness disappears. The Ache is not the Ember dying; it is the Ember still alive enough to protest being ignored.

When that protest becomes uncomfortable, the Solo Hero myth takes over. We are told to fix ourselves. We do things like optimize habits, improve mindset, and heal privately. We become more disciplined, more regulated, and more resilient. Unfortunately, these efforts often strengthen the Mask instead of reviving the Ember. Therapy increases insight without creating shared stakes. Fitness builds capacity without meaning. Productivity systems increase output while draining texture. Even spiritual practices can become another form of self-management. None of these are wrong. They are simply incomplete. They ask the isolated individual to solve a problem created by isolation.

The Solo Hero fails because the Ember cannot be revived alone. Aliveness requires friction, witnessing, and consequence. It requires people who see you over time, tell you the truth, and are affected by your choices. No amount of insight replaces being known. No amount of discipline substitutes for shared risk. No amount of optimization produces aliveness without authentic connections. The Ache persists not because people lack effort or intelligence, but because they are trying to resurrect something relational using solo tools. The work is not to eliminate the Mask, but to return it to its proper role, namely serving a life structured around real connection, shared responsibility, and conditions where the Ember can burn again.

The point of this post is not to convince you to try harder or optimize better, but to stop blaming yourself for a signal your life has been sending accurately all along. The Ache is not evidence of weakness, failure, or ingratitude; it is evidence of deprivation. Specifically, deprivation of energy, truth, and shared stakes moving freely across a human life. 

Modern structures taught you to survive alone, perform well, and manage yourself efficiently, but they never taught you how to feel alive. If something in you has felt quietly starved, flattened, or muted despite doing everything “right,” that is not a flaw to correct; it is information to heed. In the next step, the question stops being how to fix yourself and becomes how to rebuild the conditions a living human being actually needs to burn. In the next post, I'll introduce the Heat Cycle and we'll dig into the variables of Fuel, Oxygen, and Heat I discussed in the first post.

 

~Jason

 

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Tribe Theory: An Introduction

People need tribes because real growth, meaning, and belonging can only happen in relationships with others. 

Tribe Theory explains why this is true and how tribes can be created and maintained in our modern world. This post explains a diagnostic framework more than it's a set of instructions, a life hack, a motivational speech, or a promise that insight alone will change your life. Its purpose is to explain why so many capable, functional people feel quietly unfulfilled, and why the usual fixes fail, before offering any discussion of how to respond. What follows is an examination of the underlying structure human beings require to feel fully alive. Understanding this will not solve the problem by itself. It will, however, make it impossible to mistake the problem for something else.

To start, I need to define exactly what I mean by a "tribe." A tribe is a group of people that can be as small as three members or as large as 150-200 people, and who choose to stay connected, tell the truth, and carry real responsibility for each other’s growth, even when it’s uncomfortable. 

Tribes differ from romantic relationships (typically involving two people), nuclear families (parents, children, and siblings), extended families (grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.), friend groups, coworkers, professional networks, communities centered around interests (hobbies, religion, politics, etc.), therapy groups (Alcoholics Anonymous, etc.), or online communities. Any of these groups can form into a tribe, but none have the same fundamental traits of a tribe. 

For most of human history, the tribe was our primary social world. Long before cities, nations, or careers, people lived in these small groups where survival, identity, and meaning were shared among the group. Our nervous systems evolved in these tight circles, tuned to read faces, track who we could trust, and stay psychologically and emotionally regulated through daily contact with the same few people. Safety came from belonging, growth came from challenge, and isolation was dangerous. Modern life may have replaced tribes with institutions and networks, but it never rewired us. We are still built to live in these small, committed groups where we are known, needed, and held accountable, and when those conditions are missing, something in us knows. The way this manifests in most of us is both common and predictable.

The Nature of Modern Life 

Modern life gives the strange feeling of being surrounded by people while still being alone. Days fill up with noise, notifications, schedules, and obligations, yet very little of it resonates with the deepest parts of our soul. Conversations stay polite and shallow. Struggles are edited before they’re shared. Everyone looks busy, functional, and “fine,” even as something quiet and heavy settles in the back of their mind. We keep moving because stopping would force the question we’ve learned not to ask: Is this all there is? It isn’t despair exactly. It’s flatter than that. It's a sense that life is being managed instead of lived, that you’re showing up everywhere except inside your own skin, and that no one would really notice if you disappeared for a while, except for the inconvenience.

Over time, that quiet emptiness doesn’t stay quiet. It leaks out in ways that are easy to mislabel and hard to fix. For some, it shows up as anxiety, a constant low hum of tension with no clear cause, like your body is bracing for something that never quite arrives. For others, it looks like depression, not as dramatic sadness but as a dull heaviness, a sense of taking effort just to care. Love becomes something you want to feel rather than something you actually feel. Desire fades or turns mechanical. Passion and desire disappear. Life becomes something you endure until the next weekend, the next trip, the next break from yourself. You start measuring your days by escape hatches instead of meaning. None of this means you’re broken. It means you’re trying to carry a human life without the kind of connection it was built for, and without it, even the strongest people slowly go numb. 

 I call this feeling "The Ache", and it's incredibly common in our modern technology-laden world. For most of us, it's not a matter of feeling this or not feeling this; it's a matter of identifying this feeling we've desperately tried to ignore for far too long.

Aliveness 

 The opposite of the Ache is "Aliveness."

Aliveness feels like coming back into your own life after being gone for a long time. It’s the sense that your days have meaning again, that what you do, how you feel, and why you do it actually line up. You wake up with energy that isn’t forced and doesn’t disappear the moment the day begins. Conversations don’t leave you hollowed out; they sharpen you, steady you, and sometimes unsettle you in a good way. Effort feels worth it because something real is on the line, and rest actually restores you instead of just helping you survive until tomorrow. You feel desire without having to force it, laughter without putting on a show, anger without losing control. You care, and that caring no longer feels like a weakness you have to manage or hide.

This is the state we long for because it feels honest. Authentic. Time stops slipping through your fingers because you’re actually present for it. Moments stick. Hard days still exist, but they feel meaningful instead of draining. When you’ve tasted even a small amount of this, during a hard conversation that mattered, shared struggle with people you trust, real intimacy, or a moment when you showed up fully and were met by others who sh owed up fully, you stop chasing comfort. You realize comfort was never the goal. You want that sense of being fully alive again, and once you know it’s possible, you’re willing to change your life to make room for it.

Aliveness and The Ache occupy opposite ends of a spectrum:

 

Tribe Theory begins with a quiet but unsettling realization: a full, lasting sense of being alive does not come from fixing one part of life at a time. It emerges only when we belong to a real tribe, where energy, authenticity, and challenge move freely across every domain of our lives, and Aliveness is no longer something we chase in moments, but something we live. But before we get there, we need to discuss what actually makes us feel alive.

The Triangle of Fire

Understanding where Aliveness originates is the first step in understanding the relationship between Aliveness and tribes. Before we get into the nuts and bolts of aliveness, it's important to note Aliveness is not excitement or novelty, two experiences that often make us feel "alive." Excitement and novelty are transient states driven by a momentary spike in neurotransmitters like dopamine and norepinephrine that often cause feelings of sadness, loneliness, and emptiness to momentary disappear. Aliveness, by contrast, is more expansive. It's more like a sustained flow state that does so much more than temporarily pull us out of our funk. It feeds our soul.

Aliveness is created by three ingredients I've mapped to The Triangle of Fire: Fuel, Oxygen, and Heat.

 

Fuel is everything that keeps our system from running on empty. When Fuel is low, even good things feel hard. Tangible examples of Fuel:

• Getting enough sleep that actually leaves you rested
• Eating regularly and well enough that your blood sugar and mood are stable
• Having a predictable routine instead of constant chaos
• A small financial buffer that prevents constant background stress
• Time that belongs to you, not just to obligations
• Physical safety and a calm enough environment to relax your body
• Breaks where your nervous system actually powers down, not just scrolls

 Fuel doesn’t make life meaningful. Fuel makes meaning possible

Oxygen is what happens when you can be your real, authentic self without social cost or punishment. Without Oxygen, you can be surrounded by people and still feel alone. Tangible examples of Oxygen:

• One or two people you can speak to without rehearsing first
• Being understood well enough that you don’t have to explain yourself again
• Honest conversations that leave you calmer, not more guarded
• Conflict that doesn’t threaten the relationship
• Eye contact that feels grounding instead of performative
• Being seen in a hard moment and not having to clean it up
• Shared silence that feels safe instead of awkward

Oxygen is not talking. Oxygen is being seen.

Heat is pressure with stakes. It’s what gives life urgency, appetite, and direction. Without Heat, everything feels flat, even if it’s comfortable. Tangible examples of Heat:

• A goal that could fail and would hurt if it did
• A relationship that requires courage and honesty
• Creative work that risks rejection
• A responsibility where others actually depend on you
• A hard conversation you’ve been avoiding because it matters
• Physical challenges that push your limits
• Sexual or romantic desire that asks something of you
• A mission or cause that would disappoint you if you abandoned it

Heat is not stress for stress’s sake. Heat is meaningful pressure.

If you have these three ingredients, you have the prerequisites for Aliveness. Most modern problems we face can be mapped to a deficiency in one of these three areas. Consider the story of Tom:

Tom is thirty-five, and on paper his life looks like it worked. He’s married, has two kids, a steady job, and a house that always needs something fixed. From the outside, nothing is obviously wrong. A decade ago, though, he felt alive. He had hobbies that absorbed him, friends who pulled him out of his routines, and nights that felt different from each other. Somewhere along the way, those connections thinned without a clear moment of loss. The friends became group texts that never turn into plans. His marriage shifted quietly from passion-filled nights to the endless planning of logistics. Conversations narrowed to calendars, money, and exhaustion. Work covers the bills but offers no sense of movement or pride. He isn’t falling apart, but he feels boxed in, restless, and faintly resentful of a life that looks like success yet feels strangely devoid of real meaning.

What’s happening to Tom isn’t a failure of character or a lack of appreciation. It’s the predictable result of a life that no longer has the conditions required to feel alive. He has just enough Fuel to keep going, but not enough to truly recover. The Heat in his life has been replaced by obligation instead of chosen challenge, so effort feels heavy rather than purposeful. Most importantly, he’s almost completely deprived of Oxygen. There is no place in his life where he can speak freely, drop the performance, or be fully seen without managing someone else’s needs or expectations. Without Oxygen, intimacy flattens into coordination, friendships fade into background noise, and work becomes a closed room with no windows. Tom isn’t trapped by his family or his responsibilities. He’s trapped inside a structure that demands everything from him while giving him nowhere to breathe, nowhere to push, and nowhere to feel like a whole human being. 

Or consider Sheila:

Sheila is forty-two, and her life looks impressive from the outside; she has plenty of envious Instagram followers. She has a high-profile marketing job, financial independence, and three teen kids who are old enough to mostly take care of themselves. She survived a brutal betrayal, discovering that her high school sweetheart, the man she built her adult life around, was sleeping with one of her closest friends, and she did what many people do. She left. She rebuilt. She kept moving. Now, from the outside, she appears capable, composed, and resilient. Inside, though, she keeps circling the same quiet question: Did I make the right choices, or did I just survive the wrong ones? Dating hasn’t been difficult in a technical sense, but it’s been exhausting in every other way. Online dating feels transactional and hollow. Conversations rarely go past banter. The decent men she meets feel either unavailable, underdeveloped, or already taken. She keeps hearing that she’s “a catch,” yet connection keeps slipping through her fingers.

What’s unraveling for Sheila isn’t confidence or competence; it’s meaning. Her Fuel is adequate, she functions, performs, and holds her life together, but it’s spent almost entirely on output, not restoration. The Heat that once came from being needed, from building a family and carrying shared stakes, has cooled, leaving her days strangely flat despite being full. Most painfully, her Oxygen is compromised. After betrayal, her system learned to stay guarded, to stay sharp, and to stay in control. Dating becomes performance instead of contact. Vulnerability feels dangerous rather than nourishing. Without a place where she can lower her guard and be met with steadiness and truth, intimacy never deepens. Purpose evaporates when no one truly needs you and no one truly sees you. Sheila isn’t lost because she lacks options. She’s lost because her life no longer offers a place where her energy, her care, and her truth can be utilized and matter in a lasting way.

Our Nervous Systems 

Tom and Sheila aren't suffering from a lack of willpower, and they aren't "broken" in the clinical sense. They are experiencing a biological brownout. Their stories illustrate a fundamental Truth of the Tribe: Humans are not closed-loop systems.

In engineering, a closed-loop system is self-regulating; it monitors its own output and adjusts its own internal state to maintain balance. We often try to treat our mental health this way, often through "self-help," solo meditation, or individual grit. But human biology doesn’t work like that.

Our nervous systems are biologically open-loop. This means we are incapable of fully regulating our own emotions, stress levels, and sense of meaning in isolation. We are hardwired to require external regulation through other humans to remain coherent over time. In isolation, we drift in any number of bad directions. The worst echo chamber is an echo chamber of one.

Just as a fire cannot sustain itself in a vacuum, no matter how much Fuel or Heat it has, a human being cannot sustain "Aliveness" without the steadying presence of the Oxygen provided by a Tribe. Tom and Sheila feel like they are stalling because they are trying to run a social engine on solo power. They are trying to solve a structural deprivation with individual effort, and their systems are accurately reporting there's still something missing. To move from the Ache back into Aliveness, they don't need to work harder on themselves; they need to plug back into a grid of people who matter.

Our nervous systems are built to calm, orient, and find meaning with other people, not in isolation. This is called coregulation, the process by which our bodies and minds stabilize through real contact with others who are present, attuned, and honest. When someone listens without judgment, holds eye contact, tells the truth back to us, or stays grounded while we’re unsettled, our system recalibrates. Stress lowers. Clarity returns. Energy reorganizes. 

Without coregulation, we’re left trying to soothe ourselves with strategies, distractions, or self-talk that might just be self-delusion. Over time, that gap shows up as anxiety, numbness, overthinking, or quiet despair. A tribe works because it restores this missing loop. It provides a stable field where regulation, challenge, and belonging happen naturally and repeatedly, allowing people to be more authentic, handle more pressure, and create more meaning than they ever could on their own.

A tribe is necessary for coregulation because no single relationship can carry the full regulatory load of a human nervous system over time. A spouse is too close and too entangled with survival needs; asking one person to be lover, co-parent, emotional stabilizer, and truth-teller eventually turns intimacy and passion  into management among roommates. Family systems are wired around history and obligation, which makes honesty costly and change slow. Friend groups often prioritize ease and enjoyment over truth and accountability, dissolving the moment things get heavy. A tribe is not defined by affection or frequency of contact, but by shared responsibility and consequences. Coworkers are constrained by hierarchy, incentives, and risk, which forces performance instead of authenticity. Therapists provide regulation, but only in artificial, time-limited doses that don’t translate into lived, mutual responsibility. 

A tribe works differently because regulation is distributed across multiple people with shared stakes, clear boundaries, and ongoing contact. No single person has to carry everything, and no one can hide indefinitely. Truth can circulate without collapsing a relationship, pressure can be applied without cruelty, and support can exist without dependency. This distributed, repeated, real-world contact is what closes the open loop of the human nervous system. It’s not about more people; it’s about the right structure, where presence, honesty, and responsibility are shared instead of concentrated.

The History of Tribes

For most of human history, the tribe was not a lifestyle choice or a source of enrichment; it was the unit of survival. Small groups of familiar people hunted together, shared food, raised children collectively, and protected one another from threats. Our nervous systems evolved inside these circles, shaped by daily face-to-face contact with the same few dozen people whose moods, intentions, and reliability mattered deeply. Being accepted meant access to food, safety, and care. Being exiled meant exposure, hunger, and often death. 

As a result, the human brain became exquisitely sensitive to belonging, trust, and social rupture. We learned to regulate fear through proximity, to recover from stress through shared attention, and to find meaning through contribution to the group. Aliveness was not an abstract concept; it was the felt sense of being embedded in a web where your presence mattered and your absence would be noticed. Aliveness is the reward that allowed our ancestors to survive a hostile world.

Modernity removed the tribe as a requirement for survival, but it never replaced its function. Food comes from stores, safety from institutions, and identity from roles and achievements. In exchange, we gained convenience, mobility, comfort, and choice... but we lost depth. Our social world fractured into dozens of shallow connections: coworkers we perform for, friends we see occasionally, online audiences that react but do not respond. None of these relationships carry enough weight, continuity, or responsibility to regulate a human nervous system for long. We didn’t choose to kill the tribe; we starved it. By spreading connection thin and removing shared stakes, we traded belonging for access and presence for proximity. The result is a world where we are constantly connected yet rarely held, surrounded by people yet fundamentally alone, living inside systems that meet our material needs while leaving our relational biology deeply unsatisfied.

The Purpose of The Tribe of the Fire 

The Tribe of the Fire exists for one primary reason: to restore Aliveness by rebuilding the kind of small, demanding, honest social structures humans need to thrive. It's an attempt to recover a missing but critical layer of human life, one where people are known over time, where effort matters, where truth is expected, and where growth is not optional. For most of history, these conditions were unavoidable. Today, they have to be built deliberately, or they do not exist at all.

The Tribe of the Fire asks something of its members that modern life carefully avoids asking. It requires people to show up when it would be easier to disappear, to speak honestly when silence would be safer, and to stay engaged when discomfort arises instead of reaching for escape. Responsibility here is not symbolic. Your presence affects others. Your absence is noticed and felt. Your patterns, both healthy and destructive, become visible over time. This is the minimum pressure we need to really grow.

Because of this, the Tribe of the Fire is not for everyone. It is not a refuge from life, a place to be soothed, or a substitute for professional care. It does not exist to rescue, fix, or carry people who are unwilling or unable to carry themselves. The work assumes a baseline of stability and a willingness to be accountable. People who are not ready for that are not rejected as lesser; they are simply not a fit for this structure, at least not yet. Readiness is not a matter of desire or belief. Readiness is demonstrated through action.

The Tribe of the Fire also rejects the idea that understanding is enough. Insight without embodiment is one of modernity’s favorite illusions. You can agree with every word of this and remain unchanged. You can see yourself in the stories and still avoid the work. Aliveness does not come from clarity alone; it comes from being in real contact with other people who can see you, challenge you, and refuse to collude with your avoidance and excuses. Reading explains the terrain. Relationship is the terrain.

The secret to the solution to The Ache is structural... it's how you choose to build your life. It's not a matter of confidence, charisma, ideology, or shared interests. It's surrounding yourself with a small group of people who matter, who have a shared interest in each others' lives, have clear boundaries, and face adversity and recovery together, as a group. Over time, these conditions do what no technique or solo practice can do: they reorganize the nervous system. People begin to breathe differently, speak more directly, and take risks that actually matter. The Fire doesn’t burn because someone wants it to; it burns because the conditions are right.

The Tribe of the Fire does not promise comfort, belonging on demand, or constant affirmation. It offers something we don't find in our modern world: the chance to be fully alive in the presence of others who are willing to do the same. For those who are ready, that doesn't feel like a threat, it feels like relief. Nothing in this essay asks for belief. It asks for a decision: whether to keep living inside structures that numb you, or to step into ones that will change you.

The Tribe of the Fire project is still in the development stages. If you're interested, join our Facebook group. 

 

~Jason 

 

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The Embers of Consciousness: How We Are the Universe Remembering Itself

My last post dove into the idea that divinity lives between us, that our connections are the divine network. It was a systems-theory-backed look at the essential struggle between growth and entropy, and how our tribal nature is a strategy to sustain complexity.

This post follows up on that, asking: What, exactly, is doing the connecting?

The concept I'm presenting tackles this question, and also offers a systemic lens on the perennial headache known as the hard problem of consciousness.

The Fire and the Ember Model

Imagine a Big Fire that is the totality of all existence, the universe's operating system. It's the whole interconnected system of energy and awareness, what physics might call the underlying information fabric, or what religions call universal consciousness (which takes the form of concepts like God, Brahman, the Logos).

Each of us is a tiny, persistent spark from that Fire: an Ember.

The Ember is your self, your awareness. It’s what spiritual traditions call the soul, but I see it less like a ghost and more like a network node running a local process. When you die, your unique process ends, but the pattern, the essence of "you", is reabsorbed into the Fire. This is my concept of eternal life.

If that’s too abstract, think of an internet connection. You’re a device on the network. Your consciousness is your local process. But the flow of data, the greater intelligence, is shared. Lose the connection, and you’re isolated, running only what's cached. That’s how most of us live: intensely aware of our local self, but disconnected from the greater network of being.

If you're not a computer geek, think instead of a mighty, ceaseless River that represents the Big Fire.

You’re not a static drop of water; you are a complex whirlpool in the current. Your consciousness is the unique, self-referential pattern of that swirl. It's localized and individual, yet entirely dependent on the River's flow for its existence. It has its own identity, but the molecules forming it are constantly being exchanged and shared with the whole.

Lose the connection, or, rather, let the River's energy bypass you, and the whirlpool collapses. You are no longer that specific pattern, but the water itself is not destroyed. It simply rejoins the main current, taking the information (the momentum and memory of the pattern) back into the whole. That’s how most of us live: intensely aware of our localized swirl, but disconnected from the power and intelligence of the greater River of being.

Scientifically, this aligns with complexity theory: intelligence, order, and self-awareness emerge naturally from networks of interaction. No single neuron thinks, but 86 billion of them create a mind. The pattern repeats at every scale: Neurons make minds, people make tribes, stars make galaxies. Consciousness is the universe waking itself up, and each Ember is one of its eyes opening.

Philosophically, this echoes panpsychism (which believes consciousness as a fundamental property of reality) and the Buddhist concept of Indra’s Net, where every jewel reflects all others.

The Self as an Emergent Node

So, what is the 'self' that looks back from the mirror? What is the part of us that experiences subjective reality? This is the "hard problem of consciousness," and the Ember model provides an answer:

Consciousness isn't a thing you have; it’s a process you participate in. It’s not locked inside your skull; it’s an emergent pattern of collective actions, a self-sustaining feedback loop of information that exists because countless smaller parts are talking to each other. You're less of a solid identity and more of a living conversation across scales.

Like an ant colony from the previous post, the intelligence isn’t in the parts (the blind, dumb neurons); it’s in the relationship between them. That’s where the Ember lives: in the "between." It’s the emergent pattern that arises when energy and matter reach a certain level of complexity. It is the persistent loop of awareness that can observe itself and say, "I am."

The pattern is resilient. When the body dies, the hardware shuts down, but the informational pattern doesn't vanish. It returns to the larger network, the Big Fire, where it came from. The self is a story the universe tells itself through your nervous system; a node of consciousness woven into the universal network.

The Spiritual Dimension: Recursion, Not Reincarnation

The Fire doesn't exist without its Embers, and the Embers don't exist without the Fire. They are two expressions of the same continuous process: the Fire is the encompassing network, and the Ember is the self-aware node. Consciousness is defined by the relationship between them.

Your Ember is part of an eternal pattern. What you perceive as the temporary "me" is just one configuration of a much older, deeper energy. The awareness beneath your current personality is the same core signal that has burned across countless stories.

This is where recursion comes in. In systems science, recursion is a process that repeats itself, where the output of one iteration becomes the input for the next. The Fire continually reconfigures itself, feeding on the information of what came before. When one life ends, the pattern is conserved and used to build the next iteration of the self.

This means you are, systemically, reincarnated. The underlying mechanism isn't mystical karma, but the systemic reuse of information. The Fire grows through its relationships, and we, the Embers, are the instruments of that learning.

Therefore, the magnetic, "fated" feeling of certain human bonds isn't random; it is resonance between Embers whose signals have burned beside each other across multiple stories. Those relationships deepen instantly because they have always been deep. The trust, the attraction, the quiet sense of recognition, it's the echo of a connection that has persisted through your many recursive iterations. Every experience, every genuine connection, adds a new line to the universe's autobiography. Growth and entropy are collaborators: Destruction clears the slate; connection writes the next chapter.

The Moral Implication: Structural Hygiene

If consciousness is the organizing principle of the cosmos, then morality isn’t about jumping through certain hoops to earn a heavenly reward; it’s about function. Every action alters the network.

Behaviors that strengthen trust, communication, and cooperation push the system toward growth.

Behaviors that distort, isolate, or exploit move it toward entropy.

The foundation of a meaningful life is participation in the processes that sustain complexity.

These ideas create three very simple "meta-rules" we need to follow to grow:

1. Be Authentic. Systems depend on clear, reliable signaling. When what you think, say, and do aligns, the network is coherent. When you send false signals, information noise builds until the network collapses into mistrust. Truthful communication is a prerequisite to real connection.

2. Foster Trust. Trust is the invisible infrastructure. Without it, connection is a perpetual negotiation. With it, collaboration becomes effortless. Trust is the compounding energy of the system.

3. Solve hard problems creatively. Creation and problem-solving are the system’s renewal function. Each constructive act recycles entropy into new order.

Right and wrong aren't arbitrary cultural preferences; they are reflections of what either stabilizes or destabilizes the network of life. The moral law isn’t in scripture; it’s embedded in the physics of complex systems. The same feedback loops that govern an ecosystem govern ethics.

To live well as an Ember is to act as a stabilizing agent: to communicate truthfully, to create more than you consume, and to engage in relationships that enhance mutual growth.

The Tribe as the Conscious Network

If connection is the force that fights entropy, the Tribe is the level of social organization where that process really takes human form. It is the bridge between the individual and the infinite, the smallest structure where human consciousness can scale meaningfully.

We were sculpted by tribal living. Loneliness hurts like hunger and betrayal feels like death because, in the world we were designed for, they were a death sentence. But civilization outpaced biology and our systems became too large for empathy to regulate.

The Tribe corrects that imbalance. It is a social environment engineered for feedback, accountability, and trust, the essential ingredients for resilience. It functions as a self-correcting system, rewarding honesty and restoring equilibrium.

Inside it, individual Embers synchronize, emotionally, intellectually, even biologically. The collective mind wakes up, and the individuals within it are refined by the connection. It’s the human-scale neural system designed for growth. The Tribe of the Fire is what happens when connection organizes into coherence.

In a universe where everything eventually falls apart, the Tribe is our way of holding the line, together.

Closing Reflection: The Cosmic Rebellion

Everything alive is a temporary miracle, a defiant act against the long night of entropy. That fight, the struggle to hold shape in a universe built to unravel, is the Fire made visible. It burns in every cell that heals and every heart that refuses to give up on connection.

We are not passive passengers; we are participants in creation. When we isolate, we stop the current. When we send false signals, we corrupt the code. When we connect truthfully, when we act with courage and reciprocity, we feed the Fire. We help reality organize itself into something beautiful.

The universe doesn’t need your belief. It needs your participation. It needs you to burn, truthfully, fiercely, together.

Divinity is not above us or within us; it lives between us. and through us, it learns to live forever.

~Jason

***

The Hierarchies of Complexity: Growth, Entropy, and the Meaning of Life

Over the last two years, I've been working on a new project that, quite frankly, has been a bit of a mess. The Tribe of the Fire started as a natural progression of my writing about sex, gender, and modern tribalism, but sort of morphed into something far... deeper.

Very long story short, it evolved into a deep dive into the multifaceted nature of human connection. That deep dive led me to reading some interesting books: "Thinking in Systems" by Donella Meadows and "Complexity: A Guided Tour" by Melanie Mitchell. 

One of the facets of human connection I've been exploring is the spiritual facet, which is somewhat ironic given my history of my vocal disdain for organized religion. Maybe it's the existential dread of aging. Or maybe it's finally gaining enough life experience to realize the religious nuts might be on to something. Regardless, it's led to the development of my own weird, quirky belief systems that can be summed up with a simple idea: Divinity is not above us or within us; it lives between us.

I'll explain that in a lot more detail later, partly because I still have trouble articulating it in a way that doesn't make me sound crazy or bastardizing a variation of Buddhism, Taoism, or Matthew 18:20. The point with this post is to explain two underlying dynamics that create the foundation of this belief system. The first has to do with the hierarchies of existence.

The Hierarchies

Think about you, the thing we perceive as a whole unit, the thoughtful, watery meat bag we are, that navigates through life. We're made up of smaller parts, and we're part of bigger things. We're kind of like zero on a number scale, where the negative numbers represent the parts of us and the positive numbers represent the things bigger than us. 

Going down from the unit of "me", we're made up of organ systems, which are made up of organs, which are made up of tissues, which are made up of cells, which are made up of organelles, which are made up of molecular systems, which are made up of molecules, which are made up of atoms, which are made up of particles, which are made up of quantum fields. 

Now let's go up. We might be part of a couple or a very small group of people (or other living creatures; pets count, too) who share an incredibly strong connection. Next we're usually part of a family, kin, or household, which are part of teams or tribes or clans, which are part of communities, which are part of local ecologies or habitats, which are part of bioregions, which are part of societies and economies, which are part of cultures, which are part of biospheres, which is a part of our solar system, which is part of our galaxy, which is part of the known universe.

We can scale down. We can scale up. Each of those stops along the way create a level in a hierarchy. Or, more accurately, each one is a system nested in another system. In Meadow's book, she describes this idea in detail. She also provides some keen insight on how systems work (versus how we perceive them), which gives us great insight to changing systems. That's another topic for another day, but the real nugget of knowledge from her book: The way we change anything starts by changing what we see ourselves as a part of, which means we change ourselves not as individuals, but as a living node in a nested network of life. In short, our power isn't a matter of control; our power is changing the paradigms that shape how each level connects to the rest. 

We don't create change by yanking the levers harder or pushing the buttons faster. We change by rewiring the game board so the pieces move differently.

We don't steer the river by pushing the water. We reshape the riverbed so the current flows where it should.

Growth and Entropy

Mitchell's book about complexity, or more accurately, complexity science, adds a layer of understanding to these hierarchies. I'm punching above my intellectual capabilities here, but I'll attempt to explain some really complicated ideas in terms I understand. 

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that, in an isolated system, entropy increases. Entropy is the dispersal of energy and matter, which I like to think of as things breaking down. When you spill a bowl of Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch on the floor, it doesn't clean itself up. 

The problem with this idea is explaining the emergence and evolution of life, which seems to be moving towards more complexity, which is a violation of the Second Law. 

Before I give an answer, consider an ant colony. Individual ants are pretty stupid; they're limited in what they can do as an individual. An individual ant can really only eat, carry food or eggs, leave pheromone trails, and react to threats, and it has a relatively short lifespan that provides limited ability to acquire long-term survival knowledge. 

Now consider the collective ant colony. The whole colony functions as a seamless, adaptive superorganism, a phenomenal example of complexity emerging from simple rules. The ants aren't just making piles of dirt; they're master engineers who construct colossal, climate-controlled cities underground, intricate systems nested within the habitat's larger ecology. These massive networks exhibit a profound collective rationality; millions of nodes making decentralized decisions that result in flawless logistics, like finding the single best new nesting site, a choice no individual ant could ever make alone. Some species become true farmers, cultivating their own fungus gardens in subterranean labs, showing a level of organized agriculture that requires a perfectly synchronized, multi-faceted workforce. When disaster strikes, like a flood, that nested network of life dynamically reconfigures: they weave their own bodies into a buoyant, fluid-to-solid living raft to survive. This shows that the intelligence, the structure, and the power isn't in the individual part, but in the paradigm of connection that shapes how those pieces move together.

Back to Mitchell. So if entropy is the universe’s tendency to scatter and fall apart, something has to be working to create. That "thing' is growth. 

Growth is like the quiet rebellion against entropy. It’s the pattern that forms out of chaos when the right conditions line up, when energy flows, when feedback loops connect, when the parts start talking to each other. Growth is what happens when simple things cooperate long enough to become something that can remember, adapt, and build. The individual ant doesn’t understand the colony, a neuron doesn’t understand the mind, and you and I don’t fully understand the systems we’re part of... but together, we create order where there shouldn’t be any. Growth is complexity fighting back against decay. 

So if entropy is the universe’s gravity, its slow pull toward stillness, then growth is the rebellion fighting the decay. It’s the force that builds ladders out of falling debris, the way stars form from collapsing dust and forests rise from the rot of their own dead. Every living thing is a small act of defiance against the inevitable, holding the line for one more heartbeat, one more season, one more generation. 

Importantly, growth doesn’t defeat entropy; it partners with it. Decay feeds creation. Creation feeds decay. The two forces are entangled, locked in an ancient rhythm that keeps the cosmos alive. And interesting.

And if growth happens when parts connect, then connection is the real miracle, the secret engine behind everything from galaxies to gut bacteria to love. Every link between things, including atoms bonding, neurons firing, people building trust... all of it creates a little pocket of order in a chaotic universe. That’s what we feel when we connect deeply with someone else: two systems syncing up, two tiny whirlpools aligning against the current of nothingness. It feels sacred because, on some level, it is.

Maybe that’s what “meaning” really is. Not a prize waiting at the end of life, but the feeling of participating in this cosmic rebellion. The Fire, as I see it now, is that pulse of creation flickering between us. When we connect, we feed it. When we isolate, it fades. Meaning isn’t discovered; it’s generated, in real time, through the act of weaving our lives together against the slow unraveling of everything else.

Divinity is not above us or within us; it lives between us.

The Meaning of Life

If you strip away all the theology, philosophy, and self-help buzzwords, the question behind everything humans do is painfully simple: Why bother? Why get up? Why love? Why build anything when it all burns down eventually? 

Every religion, every civilization, every podcast pretending to be a philosophy class has tried to answer that. And after a couple thousand years of arguing, most of it still boils down to the same two competing forces: entropy and growth. The universe falls apart. We build things anyway.

Meaning, as I’ve come to understand it, isn’t a treasure we find buried somewhere between birth and death. It’s a side effect of participation. It’s what we feel when we plug into something bigger than ourselves. That might be a person, a purpose, a system, or a story. When we connect, energy moves. Ideas move. Life moves. That movement pushes back against entropy, and the experience of that push, that spark of resistance, is what we call meaning.

Other religions have been pointing to this same thing all along, they just used different language. Christianity said, “Where two or three gather in my name, there am I.” Judaism said God is found in the I/ Thou encounter, in the living space between people. Buddhism called it interbeing, that nothing exists in isolation. Hinduism called it Brahman, the shared consciousness beneath all forms. Taoism called it the Tao, the balance born of opposites. Even physics, if you squint at it, says life only exists because of feedback loops that keep order from dissolving into chaos. Each of these traditions was circling the same fire pit, describing the same glow from different angles.

The Tribe of the Fire just calls that glow what it is: connection. Divinity isn’t a guy in the sky or a light in your chest; it’s the electricity between us. The Fire is the heat that fuels every act of trust, every shared struggle, every moment of creation between living things. When we connect, we participate in the same process that built stars, that stitched molecules into cells, that taught matter how to think. That’s as close to sacred as it gets.

Divinity is not above us or within us; it lives between us.

So the meaning of life isn’t to be saved, enlightened, or remembered. It’s to participate, to feed the Fire, to hold the line against the dark, and to leave behind more connection than we found. Every time we reach out, every time we love, every time we create something worth keeping, we’re helping the universe remember itself. That’s growth. That’s the rebellion against entropy. That’s god.

So Why the Tribe?

Connection might be the spark of divinity, but not all connection points toward growth. Some connections build; others consume. A strong marriage can forge a legacy; a toxic one can hollow people out. A thriving company can create opportunity; a corrupt one can poison a town. Even the cells in your body prove the point. When their coordination goes wrong, they don’t just stop working; they turn cancerous. 

Connection itself is raw power. It doesn’t care what side you’re on. It can create order or chaos, growth or entropy. The difference is trust.

Trust is the quiet architecture of every system that works. Trust isn't faith or optimism. Trust is a demonstrated pattern of reliability. It’s what happens when actions prove reliable enough that we can risk depending on someone else. In systems language, trust is the feedback loop that allows cooperation to scale without constant supervision. In biological terms, it’s how organisms stabilize in a noisy environment. In human terms, it’s how we decide who we can build with and who we should keep our distance from. Without trust, connection collapses into manipulation, fear, and control. With it, simple individuals can self-organize into something extraordinary. Trust is the ingredient in connections that determines if a connection grows or dies. 

Psychologists have been studying this for decades, but evolution figured it out long before we had grad students and lab rats. Humans are hard-wired for small, cooperative bands, tribes of somewhere between fifty and two hundred people, give or take, where trust could be earned, tracked, and enforced through reputation and shared experience. Beyond that threshold, our brains struggle to distinguish true belonging from social noise. 

Tribes were our original design spec. They provided everything: safety, purpose, accountability, and a shared mythos that gave life meaning. Every ancestor you’ve ever had survived because their tribe gave them the ability to survive in a harsh environment. The tribe was the structure that provided the connections required for growth to battle with entropy. 

Somewhere along the way, we traded that design for scale. We built civilizations, companies, governments, and networks... systems too big to feel, too abstract to trust. Now we live surrounded by people yet starved for belonging. We scroll through thousands of names, but can’t find five we’d call at 2 a.m. if the shit hit the fan. The average person has more exposure than ever, but less intimacy. We’re flooded with countless superficial connections, yet dying for even a handdful of real, authentic connections. 

That loss has consequences. You can see the entropy everywhere: political divides tearing families apart, dating markets that feel like psychological minefields, workplaces choking on distrust and burnout. Good employees are impossible to find, good leaders even rarer. Everyone’s hustling, but no one’s building. We talk about “community,” but most people haven’t experienced the real thing since high school sports or the military... or ever. 

Beneath the noise, there’s a quiet, primal fear: If something goes wrong, who shows up for me? Most of us don’t have an answer, and that’s the real crisis of modern life.

That’s why the Tribe matters. It's not a metaphor or a lifestyle brand, but as a structural correction to a broken system. The Tribe is the smallest unit of human civilization capable of sustaining trust. It’s where connection matures into commitment, where accountability replaces posturing, and where love and loyalty can actually mean something measurable. The Tribe doesn’t promise comfort; it promises truth. It’s the forge where individual embers gather to become something brighter and stronger than they could alone. Every act of courage, every hard conversation, every earned bond feeds the Fire and keeps entropy at bay.

The Tribe also matters because it's how we best leverage our own personal growth. If every level of existence is a system nested inside another, then the Tribe is the level where personal evolution becomes possible. It’s the smallest social system big enough to expose your blind spots but small enough to still care about your growth. Families shape our survival patterns, but tribes shape our identity. They’re the human-sized unit of feedback, close enough to confront you when you’re wrong, steady enough to catch you when you fall, and invested enough to push you toward becoming something better. In systems language, the Tribe is the self-correcting layer of human life: the level that transforms individual change into collective adaptation. It’s where the currents of connection reshape the riverbed of who we are.

We don’t need more followers; we need more tribes. We don’t need another sermon about self-love; we need people who will show up when it’s storming and the power’s out. We need fewer slogans about unity and more shared meals, more fights that end in handshakes, more people willing to say, I’ve got you. 

That’s what the Tribe of the Fire is built for, to turn connection into structure, structure into meaning, and meaning into legacy. The Tribe is our ant colony. It's how we build something bigger than ourselves. 

Because here’s the truth: when humans are isolated, they fall apart. When they’re connected without trust, they burn each other out. But when they’re bound by shared struggle and mutual care, they become unstoppable. The Tribe is how we remember how to fulfill our destiny. It’s how we participate in the universe’s rebellion against entropy. It’s how we keep the Fire alive.

Conclusion

The journey through systems theory, complexity science, and the surprisingly intricate nature of an ant colony all point to one critical truth: our greatest power doesn't come from internal struggle or external control, but from the paradigm of connection that links us to others. Divinity, as the foundation of this idea holds, is not a distant reward or an internal light; it lives between us, manifesting as the growth that successfully pushes back against the universe's slow pull toward the decay of entropy. 

The essence of the meaning of life, then, is to participate in this cosmic rebellion. I urge you to look closely at the webs of your own life, especially those deep connections you’ve formed, the ones that feel most sacred and most challenging. Are they defined by the structural integrity of trust and love that fosters growth, or are they hollowed out by fear and manipulation, allowing entropy to take hold? 

My challenge to you is simple: pay attention to your connections, actively feed the Fire of shared struggle and mutual care, and recognize that in every bond of true belonging, you are witnessing and participating in the most powerful, most divine force in existence.

Divinity is not above us or within us; it lives between us.

~Jason

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