TRIBE: Why Your Great-Grandmother Was Happier Than You (And She Had to Churn Her Own Butter)
I have been thinking about our pursuit of happiness. Not a particularly original thought. Everyone thinks about happiness. We have apps for it. TED talks. Life coaches who charge $200 an hour to tell us mindful gratitude is the answer while we sit in traffic behind a guy texting and driving a Cyberjunk.
Sebastian Junger has written a book that suggests the problem might be simpler than we think. Junger’s 2016 book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging is essentially 150 pages of anthropological evidence that modern civilization might be the longest-running practical joke in human history, and the punchline is us sitting alone in our climate-controlled boxes wondering why we feel so empty.
The central thesis hits you with the realization that your great-grandmother who raised nine kids during the Depression was probably more content than you with your meditation app and ergonomic desk chair. Junger presents the mind-bending historical fact that white settlers captured by Native American tribes - even those taken as adults - often refused to return to "civilized" society when given the chance. These weren't Stockholm syndrome cases; they genuinely preferred native American life to their former European-American existence. Meanwhile, the reverse almost never happened. Junger discusses how the human experience is profoundly shaped by our need for genuine community bonds that modern society has systematically demolished.
Modern loneliness has a particular quality. It's not the loneliness of being actually alone, say, a lighthouse keeper or a long-distance runner. It's the loneliness of being surrounded by people who don't really see you. Your LinkedIn network of 500+ connections is probably making you lonelier than a hermit.
Another interesting observation is modern western culture is the only culture in human history that forces babies to sleep alone. This started with Northern European societies. Now it's standard Western parenting. We put newborns in separate rooms so they can "learn to self-soothe." We buy monitors to watch them from another room. We have apps that track their breathing patterns.
The rest of the world thinks we've lost our minds.
Every other society lets children sleep with parents until the children decide they don't want to. The idea of making the most vulnerable humans on Earth sleep in isolation strikes other cultures as cruel. We call it independence training. We begin the separation process before babies can even hold up their heads.
Even more disturbing is Junger's documentation of how crisis brings out the best in people, and how much they miss it when it's gone. During World War II, something unexpected happened in London. As the Blitz intensified, depression rates plummeted. Suicide dropped. Crime decreased. Mental hospitals reported fewer patients intake. The most dangerous neighborhoods saw the biggest improvements in mental health. This is not because suffering is good. This is because shared suffering creates bonds that individual comfort cannot.
Consider the modern American male. No initiation ceremony. No rite of passage. No moment when the community says, "Congratulations, you're officially not a boy anymore, here's your man card."
So he joins the military. Or doesn't, and spends his thirties playing video games while his mother does his laundry and wonders where she went wrong. Then we end up living in cities where we don't know our neighbors' names. Survival depends on credit scores and whether our health insurance covers therapy.
The uncomfortable truth Junger presents is that we've created a society optimized for individual comfort and security while accidentally destroying the social bonds that make life feel worth living. Junger argues that we're all suffering from a kind of cultural PTSD. Not from trauma, but from disconnection. Not from what happened to us, but from what we've lost.
The solution is not to romanticize the past or abandon civilization. The solution is to understand what we've traded away. And maybe, occasionally, to trade it back. To choose inconvenience over isolation. Community over comfort. Interdependence over independence. To remember that humans are tribal animals and that our cellphone cannot substitute for the pack.
It cannot. We know this. We've always known this. We just keep forgetting to remember.
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