Tribe

Over a decade ago, Sebastian Junger wrote a slim little book called Tribe. I read it cover to cover in twenty-four hours. I've been chewing on it ever since. I picked it up in a Seattle airport. Walked past it first. Sat at my gate. Then, something in me wouldn't let it go. I went back. Bought it. And somewhere over the Cascades, it cracked something open in me. The timing mattered. I'd spent the better part of a year as a stranger in strange lands, chasing myself across time zones, convinced that the next city, the next adventure, the next version of me would be the one that finally stuck. What Junger said, quietly and with evidence, was that I'd been looking in exactly the wrong direction. Junger's central argument is uncomfortable, because it implicates all of us. Modern life, he says, has given us extraordinary comfort and stripped us of something more essential in the trade. The warmth, the solidarity, the bone-deep sense that your life is woven into others'. What he calls the…