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
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
***
No comments:
Post a Comment