Breaking Down Walls: Exploring the Balance Between Tribes and Individuality

”Cristina Amigoni: Sometimes out of the tribe is loneliness, but then that's when it becomes that cycle of like we can't survive being alone. We can't survive with loneliness. So we go find any type of tribe that will let us feel like we're not alone."

Alex Cullimore: Welcome to Uncover the Human where every conversation revolves around enhancing all the connections in our lives. 

Cristina Amigoni: Whether that's with our families, co-workers, or even ourselves. 

Alex Cullimore: When we can be our authentic selves, magic happens.

Cristina Amigoni: This is Cristina Amigoni. 

Alex Cullimore: And this is Alex Cullimore.

Both: Let’s dive in. 

“Authenticity means freedom.”

“Authenticity means going with your gut.”

“Authenticity is bringing 100% of yourself not just the parts you think people want to see, but all of you.”

“Being authentic means that you have integrity to yourself.”

“It's the way our intuition is whispering something deep-rooted and true.”

“Authenticity is when you truly know yourself. You remember and connect to who you were before others told you who you should be.”

“It's transparency, relatability. No frills. No makeup. Just being.”

[EPISODE]

Alex Cullimore: Hello, and welcome back to this much more antagonistic episode of Uncover of the Human. We decided we're going to explain by example.

Cristina Amigoni: So you can press stop now before you even know what it's about. 

Alex Cullimore: We're just going to have some real back and forth here. No, we wanted to talk about something that is definitely part of all of our lives and sometimes in a macro-scale, sometimes in a micro-scale, but something that affects us deeply because we are very much attuned to in-group versus out-group thinking, tribalism. The idea of getting into a tribe of people. Getting in and basically defining that sometimes in opposition to other tribes, often in opposite to other tribes. If this is my tribe, that's another tribe, then this is not okay. And this is something that falls directly from our evolutionary upbringing being in tribes, but it doesn't mean that that doesn't misfire dramatically in our much more interconnected and large world. 

Cristina Amigoni: And it is something we're not going to stop doing or stop searching for. Wes are hardwired to figure out which tribes we belong to, if we have a tribe. Because tribe equals survival.

Alex Cullimore: Yes, and it is survival. Being part of the survival being part of the thing that will help you survive and that you help support. It's understandable and very natural. And we're never going to stop feeling the group pull, if this is our group, that's not our group. It's kind of funny that we often do things like – well, I mean, high school is just so clicky and so is middle school. Middle school is just all kinds of clicks. 

Cristina Amigoni: Because the rest of life is not. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. That's just when we can most accurately see them and we're in a group of like 400 people where we see that, okay, we can see where the clicks are. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. 

Alex Cullimore: But at work, we all have groups, we all have departments, we all have just groups of people we've gotten used to talking to, maybe gotten used to ignoring, we got used to being frustrated by. Whatever it is, there are some types of tribes.

Cristina Amigoni: We judge entire groups rather than being curious about the individuals. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. Yes. That's actually a great starting place, thinking about tribes as groups. We think of it as like everybody who is a part of this group has all of these traits, and I love/hate that. I don't know. Whichever one it is. I love all of that. I hate all of that. That means everybody who associates with this group is terrible. And we've seen a thousand different iterations of this through human history. I mean, there's things like McCarthyism in the 60s, where you can just throw out the word communist. And because there were so many scary implications of that, that that became a witch hunt of communism. And you could blame people for being communists. And it became painted with the entire brush of whatever that meant for people. 

That's the dangerous part of this is that you always end up painting with broad strokes because it's very hard to interpret the world one person, one event at a time. We try and see patterns. We try and see tribes. We try and see categories. And that can be really unhelpful when we're trying to unpack and reach out or have any kind of connections with or not just fight with another tribe, so to speak. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. So let's start with the benefits of tribes. 

Alex Cullimore: Jump on it. Benefits of tribes. 

Cristina Amigoni: How do you feel about – 

Alex Cullimore: Besides survival. 

Cristina Amigoni: Actually, sorry, my mug is going to speak for me. 

Alex Cullimore: How does that make you feel? 

Cristina Amigoni: How does that make you feel? 

Alex Cullimore: I think you have a really important one. It's survival. There's a feeling of belonging. We are social animals. There is actually – it satisfies primal needs. We do need to feel like we have a group. We feel like we have some belonging. There's all kinds of studies now on the epidemics of loneliness. And then people not feeling like there's a group. When you have a tribe, you feel like you have some identity that is larger than yourself. It can give you some purpose.

And then there's lots of different tribes that we essentially belong to. But when we do that, we have that feeling of community. We have that feeling of support, that feeling of, "Hey, there are other people who are also like me. I'm not alone. I'm part of something bigger than me. I would happily contribute to this. This means something to me that is beyond just myself." This is something that I think it does connect us to something that's larger. And it gives us support. It gives us people that we can lean on when we're in times of need. People that we can help when they're in times of need. And people that we would gladly do so, we would gladly bend over backwards. 

People often talk about humans being selfish or closing off. And, yes, they do sometimes close off from each other. But there's also tales, if you look around for them, of people going and bending over backwards to help the people that they are close to, that they relate to. Whether that's their neighbors. Whether that's their family. Whatever the thing that they have defined as their circle, people will often go to extreme lengths to help and support that. 

Cristina Amigoni: And we need it. I mean, a big reason why there is a huge loneliness epidemic, which has impacts all over the place. It has health impacts. I mean, loneliness has been linked to or has been equated to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. That's the health impact of not having a community of loneliness. It has a community impact because now the community is not a full functioning community. And there's just well-being, social well-being's impact, there's emotional impact. And so, we do need it. We do need tribes. We do need our communities. So we seek for it because we need it. It is wired for us to belong and to be part of a community. Not to be alone. It's a big piece. 

And the other side of that is figuring out, are we making another group an enemy now that we belong in this one? Or are we just focused on helping and being part of a community and bringing the best that we can to be part of the community? 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. Understanding when it is support and when it is not. And one thing that strikes me the people who often talk about the journey through life where we kind of we're kids. We are a part of like a family group. Then we become like teenagers and we do a lot to try to fit in. We tend to do a lot to fit into whatever is there. And then we spend a lot of time in adulthood trying to become more of ourselves and instead of who we became to try to fit into groups. 

And so, I think that that's a huge aspect of the both benefit and trap of tribalism is that we can end up kind of forming ourselves towards a community and losing ourselves in that. Whereas a community – and one of the expressions that I've heard is one from, I think, Scott Peck's book on The Different Drum was talking about soft individualism rather than rugged individualism where everybody is essentially an individual within a community. They have all of their own personalities and expressed unique personhood but as a collective. They all allow each other to have that. You're not just conforming to one group ideal. And I think that's a huge red flag when you start to feel like you're a part of a tribe that you have to change yourself for, that you have to be part of. Or there are essentially standards that don't necessarily fit you, that start to really bend who you are, who you were to try and fit into that box. Because that box is often defined, when you're not in that, then you're in another tribe. And that's where you start to enter exactly what you're talking about, which is out of that tribe is the enemy. Out of that tribe is bad. 

Cristina Amigoni: Exactly. Sometimes out of the tribe is loneliness, but then that's when it becomes that cycle of like we can't survive being alone. We can't survive with loneliness. So we go find any type of tribe that will let us feel like we're not alone. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. And this poses some real challenges for general society. This is something that has been studied for hate groups. The people who are in hate groups, it's not necessarily that they even have that much hate. They just found a place where they belong. They found a place where if they parrot these beliefs and then it becomes more of their own belief and it becomes this kind of feedback cycle, self-perpetuating cycle of getting deeper and deeper into it because they feel some amount of belonging. They feel like they're connected to this group. If they also share this hatred, they can feel like they belong. 

Of course, there are incredibly dangerous implications of that. That can become violent. That can become really, really antagonistic, if not violent. That becomes a very dangerous trail. But it starts based on that belonging. And it makes it hard for us sometimes to cross those bridges because we don't want to always invite somebody who has so much hate into our group and be curious about them and try and give them a different place to belong because it feels like we're reaching into something that may be totally against our values. And there's no easy way to do that. But that doesn't change the fact that those groups were created because it's a tribe, because it's belonging, because they found some kind of solace. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, indeed. How do we lean into the necessity and benefits of being in community, of having a community, being part of a tribe, without making everything outside of that tribe the enemy? 

Alex Cullimore: It's a great hypothetical question. And we should send that out to – 

Cristina Amigoni: I don't have an answer. 

Alex Cullimore: We'll have a very succinct answer for this, I'm sure. I think we've had a really few important aspects of it. I think it goes back to some of the things that you would ask when you're trying to just understand and depreciate things in your own life or change anything in your own life. Understand what's serving you and not. Understand whether what part of you it's serving. Is this serving just a feeling of belonging? Is this serving a greater core value? Is this something that we're just, "Thank goodness, we don't feel lonely?" Or is this something where this is important and I would do this? Whether I was doing this alone or not? I'm just glad that I have a community. 

Maybe it's understanding that understanding when we start to feel like there is an other that we have to distance ourselves from, which is obviously a pretty heavy portion of politics currently. There's a very charged political landscape where it's difficult to reach across that divide because we have defined pretty strong lines. And those ones are very difficult because of the values argument like this. This doesn't feel like it fits with my values. I don't know that I can open that. And so, how do we do those things? I don't know. But I think that asking yourself what's really serving you is a good place to start. And whether this is something that actually benefits things that are important to you. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, definitely. And I think, also, standing or being very clear with how much authenticity we can show up with. In the community, in the tribe that we either think we belong in, or we're building, or we're part of, do we feel like we can show up as our full selves? Can we show up as our best selves and our true selves and still be accepted? Or are we kind of back in middle school and in high school and, well, many other times in life where we have to mold ourselves? Where we have to hide some parts and exaggerate other parts which may not be true about who we actually are to fit in, to not be excluded? Because exclusion is the opposite of survival. Exclusion means loneliness. Exclusion means the end. It's suffering. And so, are we being accepted? And that can change. 

Just because that's possible one day, it may be gone the next day. And then we have to continuously rebuild and reevaluate, "Where's my tribe? What's my community that is actually accepting me as me as we grow?" Because we also grow. And I would say that's also the other thing to look at. Can the community help you grow? Or is the community, the tribe, force you to shrink instead of growing? 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah, that's a great way of putting it. I think that that touches on both the thing they want to look at as well as the reason it's difficult. Because it is survival, it is something that can easily be just triggered, especially as an amygdala response. It's something that is so base-level to our survival that our brain will try and get us into belonging because that's survival more than it would get us into acceptance. Something called a Maslow's Hierarchy. Let's get to belonging first and then let's get to accepting me. 

That presents us with the opportunity in the modern world to try and train ourselves to understand that there are other communities out there. And this is maybe one benefit of social media where some of it may have absolutely created a lot of tribes and bubbles. There's also the understanding that there's a bunch of other tribes and bubbles. If you're feeling like this one is pushing on your identity and it's not what you want to be, but you feel like you have to be it to be part of that community, there are other ones out there. And that's a hard thing to accept consciously because of the pain of changing a group and the worry that we might not belong in another one. And that we don't want to let go of the one we currently belong in. Because those are all survival triggers. But there are chances for us to try and consciously challenge that a little bit and be like, "There will be more. There will be another place to land. I know the world is wide and there's places to be." 

And that is not the way easier said than done, but something to keep in mind because we are going to be triggered for survival reasons, which are going to make it really hard to fight into those and to find those conscious ones. But there are also – because the world is so wide, and we are so interconnected, and we do have the internet, we can see that other groups do exist. And trying to take that leap of faith on ourselves that we can find one that better fits and that isn't trying to mold us. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, indeed. And then remember, yes, there are groups. We look to be part of a group. We build groups. We seek for that. And we're individuals within the groups. And so, if the tendency to look at another department and be like, "Oh, that's payroll. They always do this." Or, "That's IT. They never take care of things when they're supposed to." Create connections with individuals. Once you have created connections with the individuals, it's going to be less likely to lump all people IT into that judgment of one experience which might have not even been your experience. It's something you heard of. 

It's interesting because if we can focus on human connections at the individual level, we no longer satisfy our need to belong and our need to be part of a community, and we're increasing the community and we're diversifying the community. But we also break down the walls and the silos between groups and tribes. 

Ultimately, it's a lack of connection. It's a lack of human connections. Establish human connections. Pick up the phone. Have the conversation. Ask how somebody's day is. Anything that will allow you to show up as a human who's connecting with another human. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes, I think that's absolutely the perfect second step. The first step I would think is also having some critical thinking around what that identity is coming from. Because I think it's easy to point at things like the media environment and say, "Oh, yeah. It's not giving a fair portrait." It's easy to look at – and that's true. We're ere going to go through the things that are sensational. That doesn't make them the common case. That just makes them the sensational case. And then we paint the whole with that one extreme story. It happens at work. It happens internally as well. We'll hear the stories of like, "Oh, here's one time." And sometimes we're trading stories at like a happy hour. And they're entertaining stories of like some massive dysfunction that just accidentally happened or on purpose happened. But it then ends up starting to paint the picture in our minds of like, "That's what payroll's like. I can't trust them for this." 

Critical thinking about like what stories have I been told? What are other alternative realities? And then going exactly to that, all the steps you're talking about, where we go in and reach out. Make those connections. Make sure that we're validating those stories that we've been told or we're telling ourselves, so that we have the actual more full picture. As full as we can get to. So that we can have a little bit more fair perspective on this. 

Because there are things that will be frustrating. There are things that maybe this department really isn't particularly reliable. Maybe more than half the time they do mess something up. It doesn't mean you can't find ways around that or find connections and then it helps you from – prevent you from painting them with a large rush. And then you're the one telling the stories of, "By the way, Jim over here is really good to go to if you have a problem with that." And suddenly, people are going there. And then everybody's asking, "Why is everybody going to Jim?" And that starts to create the change of like maybe everybody needs to be like Jim or whatever it is. 

Cristina Amigoni: Be Jim. 

Alex Cullimore: Be Jim.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. And in those human connections, it's okay if it doesn't work out. Not everybody has to become part of the problem. Not everybody has to become in the inner circle of community or even the second circle of community. There are different circles of communities around us. And some people will never belong to any of those circles, and that's okay. That's like we don't need to belong in every single circle either. 

Alex Cullimore: And it also doesn't mean you need you try to crush that other circle and make sure it doesn't exist. It can just exist separately.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Exactly. It doesn't make it the enemy. It just doesn't make it a circle you want to invest in. It's not an enemy. It's just another circle. 

Alex Cullimore: Just another circle.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. 

Alex Cullimore: Good. That will be our episode title. It's just another circle. 

Cristina Amigoni: Throw the circles in the airs and see how many you catch. 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. That's a good point too, when we talk about loneliness. I think the Surgeon General under Obama talks about loneliness. And I think he was the first place I heard this idea, but it might not be, about there being like four levels of closeness for relationships. There's like your closest, your intimate relationship with like a partner or a spouse. And then there's your second circle, which is a little bit bigger, maybe like five people total of really close friends. Really close people that you continually lean on, you talk to. That's your second-level tribe. This really close friend. And there's the more abstract, like, "Hey, I have friends who are in an understood community." And then there's the wider one, which is being part of an even broader context. 

Obviously, as you can probably tell just in imagining those circles, there's different levels of connection you feel with all of those. But all of those are necessary portions of us feeling less lonely. We supply the need in each of those levels to whatever extent that we feel that it might be a little bit different person-to-person. But those are all four important aspects to think about when we're trying to work on our own loneliness. There's no way we're going to get that perfectly all the time. It's just something to think about like, "Oh, maybe I'm missing more of this circle. Maybe I need to invest more in that."

 Cristina Amigoni: They're fluid circles. They're fluid because, yes, sometimes we invest more in one versus another one. They're fluid because the members of the circles change. We grow, they grow, life happens, we make choices. And sometimes we take somebody out of a circle and we add two more people into a level that we're not there before. 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. And that's natural. And it doesn't make it easier. It doesn't mean there's not a grieving processes as things change. It doesn't mean that we can just accept all that. But we can at least know that it's natural instead of thinking, "Why can't I keep these circles forever?" We can know, "Yeah, this is just a natural portion of it. And I have to get comfortable with the discomfort of, yeah, this is something that I think has to change, just because I think it has to change." 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, indeed. Happy tribing. 

Alex Cullimore: Enjoy your fluid circles. 

Cristina Amigoni: Enjoy your fluid circles. 

Alex Cullimore: Tribes aren't necessarily bad. Just don't make them bad. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, exactly. Find your community, build your community. Maybe don't make the other communities enemies. They can just exist without being the enemy. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes. Or start a war. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Either way. Thanks for listening. 

[OUTRO]

Alex Cullimore: Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of Uncover the Human. Special thanks to Raechel Sherwood who helped produce our theme. And, of course, our production assistants, Carlee and Niki, for whom we could not do this or could not publish this. We get to do basically the fun parts. And thank you to We Edit Podcasts for editing our podcasts. 

Cristina Amigoni: You can find us at podcast@wearesiamo.com. You can find us on LinkedIn. You can find us at Uncover the Human on social media. Follow us. And We Are Siamo is wearesiamo.com. 

Alex Cullimore: Please feel free to reach out with questions, topics you'd like addressed. If you'd like to be on the show, reach out. We're around. Thank you, everybody, for listening. 

[END]