Build Your Tribe

One of the ironies of modern society, of affluent society is that we're wealthy enough, as a nation, we're wealthy enough to actually not need each other very much, not need each other individually. That's a great liberation from the group. But there's a real human loss there. So when you deploy overseas, all that's being stripped away. And you're getting this primal human experience. You're in a harsh environment. You're taking your meals together, doing tasks together, sleeping shoulder to shoulder sometimes in the dirt maybe, depending on the kind of unit you're in. People in a situation like that have this extraordinary experience of trusting other people with their lives, other people that they may not even like very much, but they trust them and vice versa. You take people that have had that, and you pick them up and you bring them over, and you drop them back down in America, in the great American suburb or wherever they're from.

All of a sudden, they're sleeping by themselves in their own apartment, maybe with their family, a single family home. They don't have the protection of others around them. They don't have the emotional security of 30 or 40 people around them. What happens? Of course, the risk of mental illness goes up. And we know as affluence goes up in a society, the suicide rate goes up, the depression rate goes up. And you don't have to have been in combat either. I mean, combat adds a level of trauma that has to be dealt with. But as a species, we're wired to survive trauma. I mean, if trauma was incapacitating to a majority of people for their entire lifetime, we wouldn't be here as a species. We wouldn't have survived. You will get over the trauma. You're wired to get over it.

But what we're not wired for is alienation and loneliness. We're a social species. We want to be with other people. If you give us that experience and then you take it away, it's not going to feel very good. And understand that if you come home and you're struggling, it doesn't mean you have PTSD. It doesn't even mean you have psychological problems. Having a negative reaction to this society actually might mean that you're doing quite well, that you have healthy instincts that have been reborn inside you overseas. You now understand that a good, meaningful happy life requires the proximity of others, requires being part of a group where they need you. You have to put the group first.

And when you do that, there's a reciprocal arrangement where they will also put you first. That is what humans are looking for. Your new job-- your new job is to bring your wisdom from overseas back into this world. Create communities around you. It's great to have affiliations, online or across the country of people, that share your concerns, share your interests. That's great. But it's not tribe. When you're talking about tribe, you really are talking about people around you, physically around you, people where you can walk across the street and knock on the door. Create those relationships in your neighborhood. Create relationships at work. Reform your churches, reform your politicians, reform your schools, reform your neighborhoods. This country has always depended on those close, communal relations to survive and to thrive. We're the most powerful country in the world.

We're the country that many, many people around the world want to come to. And it's for those reasons, that we're a fair and justice-seeking society. And when you work towards those goals, not only are you serving a public good, you will actually rediscover that sense of purpose, that sense of meaning, that sense of inclusion that you had overseas with your platoon, with your unit. Those days that might now seem like the best days of your life, you can have those again in this country. But it's going to take a lot of work.