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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