We all want to belong. We want that warm, comforting feeling of being around people with whom we have something in common. Something meaningful. We want that sense of connection, of us, together, against the world.

We, as humans, used to have tribes, villages. Communities where we knew everyone else, where we were part of an ‘us’. Our communities grew larger over the generations, and we no longer had the same feeling of community based on where we lived, who we lived with.

We used to stay in the same job for decades, and we made that our tribe, but we don’t do that any more.

Now, we find our tribes. We find a group of people who like something that we like, and we adopt that tribe as our own.

For many, this is support of a particular sporting team. While I’ve never been one who follows sports in general, I definitely get the appeal of that – it’s just not for me.

The self-selected tribes I find most interesting, in terms of the way people behave, are those that are formed around brands. There are two that come to mind most readily – Ford vs. Holden, particularly in Australia, and Mac vs. Windows.

As an outsider to both camps, the Ford vs. Holden thing is strange and bizarre to me. At a glance, without looking at the badges, I’d be hard pressed to tell them apart. To hear from those inside the tribes though, the differences are extreme – one is the worst piece of unreliable shit to ever be smeared on public roads, the other is a godlike machine of grace and beauty.

They’re just cars.

On the other hand, as an insider to both Mac and Windows (and, arguably, Linux) camps, things are just as bizarre and alien. Windows is for gaming and my day job. Linux is for servers. Mac for everything else. I see people on various forums raging about how Macs are made for dumb people and lock you into their walled garden (they aren’t and they don’t) or how Windows crashes every 5 minutes and is useless at security (it doesn’t and isn’t).

For myself, I prefer to adopt myself into tribes with no natural enemy, I’ve found my tribe of writers, I’ve found a couple of gamer tribes (for Elite Dangerous, mostly, but also for DayZ). All of these tribes, we have a commonality of goals. Writers who want to be better writers, helping other people to become better, sharing details of craft, ideas, feedback, banter and friendship. Commanders (what player-pilots are called in the game Elite Dangerous) are almost notorious for being Aggressively Helpful to new players.

So what’s the point of this? This post, this rambling wander through tribalism as we experience it in our lives.

Ultimately, I think that tribes that form on the basis of Us Vs. Them tend to veer too easily towards to toxic and hateful. The teenager beaten for wearing the wrong sporting colours in that part of town, the online abuse for someone who dare suggest that one technology has benefits that the other doesn’t. The gate-keeping, where if you can’t name every player on the team for the last 10 years, then you’re obviously not a Real Fan.

These tribes are damaging, isolationist, exclusionary. None of these are good traits

On the other hand, the tribes I’ve found are inclusive. Welcoming. Supportive. We love this, and we want for you to love it too. Come write, I want to hear your story! Come play this game that I love!

Come! Be part of our tribe. We welcome you!

I think about tribalism a lot. I’ll probably write about it some more here, as time goes on.